In 2005, China, seemingly in response to pressure from the international community, moved the Chinese Yuan from a hard peg against the U.S. Dollar to a valuation scheme against a basket of international currencies. Whether the revaluation of the Yuan was in response to U.S. domestic pressure rising from the increasing U.S.-Chinese trade deficit, manufacturing migration, rising concerns about globalization, is open to debate. This thesis examines the 2003 United States -- China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC), international organizations, U.S. trade law, and technologic applications within the context of globalization to provide an alternate understanding of why the perceived pressure to revalue the Yuan was so quickly and vigorously pursued. / US Air Force (USAF) author.

M.A. / Prof. D.J. Geldenhuys

Prof. W.M. Conradie

Over the past decades, anti-globalization groups have denounced trade as a major source of environmental degradation in both the developed and developing worlds. From heated debates on trade in endangered species to the more recent public concern about the global climate, the international community has been struggling over maintaining a balance between economic growth and environmental protection in the context of globalization. Drawing on panel data of more than 170 countries, my research investigates whether trade openness results in more environmental and climate degradation. More specifically, I look at how different levels of development interact with trade openness and domestic value added ratio. These interactions have important implications for environmental and climate outcomes. / Independent Study for the Degree of B.A., Professor David Deese.

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The past three decades have witnessed the extraordinary emergence of several global cultural realms for the crossborder flow and consecration of cultural goods (e.g., in the visual arts, music, or literature). Scholars have debated whether such accelerated dynamics of the globalization of culture are leading to the worldwide dominance of cultural goods from a few Western countries--and in this sense to growing cultural homogeneity--or whether they facilitate the increasing transnational dissemination and recognition of cultural creations from other non-Western contexts, such as Asia, Latin America, or Africa--and thus entail increasing cultural diversity. Focussing on the case of the contemporary visual arts and elaborating Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production further from a national to a global scale, the dissertation specifies the conditions under which artists from non-Western regions become visible and recognized in a global cultural realm. In contrast to the established theoretical models in the globalization of culture literature--the political economy model of cultural imperialism, the global flows and networks model, or the global culture strategies model--a field approach extended to the global scale has the principal advantage that it permits to differentiate between the hierarchical structures, transnational networks, and cultural rules of different subspaces in the same global cultural universe. From this perspective, the dissertation develops an alternative argument that goes beyond approaching cultural homogeneity or diversity as an either/or problem. Drawing upon a rich array of sources and combining interpretative and quantitative methodologies, I argue that there are systematic differences in the conditions of worldwide artistic recognition and diversity in globalizing cultural circuits that are based on a logic of intellectual prestige and charisma on the one hand, and those that are ruled by a commercial logic on the other. Hence, I make the case that, in order to capture the complexities of cultural diversity in a period of accelerated globalization, it is necessary to take into account and theorize more fully the institutional diversity of global cultural realms themselves. The dissertation is divided into four parts: the first part clears conceptual ground by discussing aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production that have to be modified or added when the framework is moved beyond national boundaries to a transnational or global level. The second part investigates the worldwide diffusion of contemporary art institutions across more than 140 countries, and it also examines discourses of artistic globalization and global art and additional historical sources, in order to illuminate the institutional formation of a global cultural field in the contemporary visual arts since the 1980s that is transcontinental in geographic scope and cultural orientations. The third part asks how these global transformations have affected the recognition of artists from different parts of the world. Drawing upon encompassing data of the transnational careers of leading artists in the global exhibition space and global auction market, I show that the contemporary visual arts are structured around a dual world economy of recognition, and that, correspondingly, dynamics of artistic diversity have evolved in systematically different ways with regard to global symbolic capital or global economic artistic success. Building on the insights from this broader structural account, the third part engages with an in-depth case study comparison of the biographies of outstanding artists from China and Mexico (Yue Minjun and Gabriel Orozco), who have achieved either high economic success or symbolic recognition in the global art field. They are representatives of the first artistic generation in the history of the contemporary visual arts that might be termed global. By explaining how these artists rose to worldwide leading artistic positions, the dissertation brings to light additional different historical, social and cultural preconditions for the inclusion and consecration of artists from non-Western regions at the intellectual and commercial poles of the same global cultural realm. Overall, by expanding insights of one of the classical studies in the sociology of culture, Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art, the dissertation advances an understanding of the `global rules' of art, that is, the core-periphery structures, transnational networks, cultural practices as well as classificatory schemes of interpretation and valuation that are intertwined with the making of worldwide artistic reputations and careers in a global cultural realm. It thereby offers a window onto the making and dynamics of what I designate as a "dual world economy of recognition." In addition, through the substantive lens on worldwide artistic recognition and careers, the dissertation develops further a new theoretical approach to the globalization of culture that goes beyond certain polarities among established theoretical models, as between cultural homogeneity vs. diversity, structures and meaning, macro vs. micro, or structure vs. agency. By comparing transnational and global processes at both an intellectual and commercial pole of the same global cultural field, it elaborates a theoretical model that is multi-dimensional and multi-leveled. It permits to study processes associated with the globalization of culture--as, for example, cultural crossborder flows and exchange, cultural inequalities or cultural diversity--by linking different macro and micro level factors. Lastly, the dissertation also offers a step toward advancing general global field analysis as an emerging new theoretical paradigm in global and transnational sociology vis-à-vis more established broader theoretical approaches, such as world-systems analysis or world polity theory. By theorizing and substantiating the institutional core-periphery configurations of a whole global field, involving both its autonomous and heteronomous pole, it develops a template for reconstructing the institutional making of a field at a global scale both in its structural and cultural dimensions.

This dissertation examines the impact of globalization on firms’ organization, and documents how these organizational changes impact employment, efficiency and welfare in the domestic economy. In the first chapter, I study the impact of Chinese imports on employment of US manufacturing firms. Previous papers have found a negative effect of Chinese imports on employment in US manufacturing establishments, industries, and regions. However, I show theoretically and empirically that the impact of offshoring on firms, which can be thought of as collections of establishments – differs from the impact on individual establishments – because offshoring reduces costs at the firm level. These cost reductions can result in firms expanding their total manufacturing employment in industries in which the US has a comparative advantage relative to China, even as specific establishments within the firm shrink. Using novel data on firms from the US Census Bureau, I show that the data support this view: US firms expanded manufacturing employment as reorganization toward less exposed industries in response to increased Chinese imports in US output and input markets allowed them to reduce the cost of production. More exposed firms expanded employment by 2 percent more per year as they hired more (i) production workers in manufacturing, whom they paid higher wages, and (ii) in services complementary to high-skilled and high-tech manufacturing, such as R&D, design, engineering, and headquarters services. In other words, although Chinese imports may have reduced employment within some establishments, these losses were more than offset by gains in employment within the same firms. Contrary to conventional wisdom, firms exposed to greater Chinese imports created more manufacturing and nonmanufacturing jobs than non-exposed firms. The second chapter proposes a new channel through which financial shocks affect firms – imported intermediate inputs – and investigates its empirical implications for firms' production decision in a panel of Hungarian firms and banks. In a model of liquidity-constrained heterogeneous firms, only the most productive firms import the higher productivity foreign intermediates because these firms are the only ones that can afford the necessary financing. In this model, a financial liberalization results in lower interest rates on bank loans that reduces the relative cost of imported intermediates, induces firms to become importers and leads continuing importers to import more. Thus capital market liberalization acts like trade liberalization. Using the last stage of Hungarian financial account liberalization in 2001 as a natural experiment, I find that, as predicted by the theory, firms whose banks were given access to new international sources of credit increased their intermediate import shares of production. Moreover, this increase was financed by the short-term liquidity arising from the liberalization. These findings support the hypothesis that positive credit supply shocks reduce the relative cost of imported intermediates, and induce firms to import and increase the share of imports in their intermediate input use. The third chapter, co-authored with Richard Clarida, shows that the financial channel can substitute in a welfare-improving way for the trade channel in small open economies’ external adjustment. Countries can adjust internationally through the trade and the financial channel. Gourinchas and Rey (2007) have shown that the financial channel can complement, or even substitute, for the traditional trade adjustment channel via a narrowing of the country’s current account imbalance. However, they only use a log linearization of a net foreign asset accumulation identity without reference to any specific theoretical model of international financial adjustment (IFA). In this chapter we calibrate the importance of IFA in a standard open economy growth model (Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe, 2003) with a well-defined steady state level of foreign liabilities. In this model there is a country specific credit spread which varies as a function of the ratio of foreign liabilities to gross domestic product. We find that allowing for an IFA channel results in a very rapid convergence of the current account to its steady state, relative to the no IFA case. While on the long term, all of the adjustment is via the IFA channel of forecastable changes in the cost of servicing debt and in appreciation of the real exchange rate. By contrast, in the no IFA case, current account adjustment by construction does all the work, and this adjustment is at a slow rate.

acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation examines space in 21st century cultural artifacts from Latin America, including narrative and film. My contention is that cultural artifacts from Latin America oscillate between advocacy for cosmopolitan globality and contestation of globalizing forces, making space the theater of the political. I focus on the tension between the global and the national, and how space helps understand the way in which cultural products imagine globalization. The first chapter explains the concepts of ‘place’ and ‘non-place’ theorized by cultural anthropologist Marc Augé. Then, it uses Augé’s categories to examine the representation of the political tension between globalization and the nation-state in an analysis of the novel Zanahorias voladoras (2004) by the Colombian Antonio Ungar (1974-), by focusing on the relationship between trauma, nation and globalization. In the second chapter, I discuss the work of geographer Doreen Massey to explain the importance of understanding how globalization affects different subjectivities in different ways. Then, I analyze Passageiro do fim do dia (2010) by the Brazilian author Rubens Figueiredo (1956-), especially the space of a bus where most of the novel take place, as places of contestation to the globalizing processes that exclude certain subjectivities. Finally, I read the film El hombre de al lado (2009) by Argentine directors Mariano Cohn (1975-) and Gastón Duprat (1969-) as an allegory of the tension between the national and the global, highlighting spatiality and positionality as important categories to understand Latin American cultural production. The third chapter proposes an understanding of mobility using the category dislocated subjects, which I derive from work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. In Hotel Pekín (2008) by Colombian author Santiago Gamboa (1965-), the protagonist Frank Michalski is a dislocated subject due to the complex relationship to his past as a former Colombian national and his current life as a global-trotting executive. In Azul-Corvo (2010) by Brazilian writer Adriana Lisboa (1970-), the protagonist is a dislocated subject, as she moves from Brazil to the United States to look for her biological father. At the end, the novel proposes dislocation as a possible community of transnational, transcultural and multilingual identities. / 1 / Camilo A. Malagon

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