CAREER: Welfare Gains from Economic Integration: A Unified Approach

摘要提案标题：职业：经济一体化带来的福利收益：统一的方法提案编号：SE-1255298主要调查者：康斯坦丁的阿科拉基斯国际贸易领域的研究议程在过去十年中发生了戏剧性的变化。关于出口商规模优势的新证据推动了对企业异质性的建模，从而产生了一个新的国际贸易分析框架。这一领域的这些变化也促使人们重新考虑这个古老而紧迫的问题：经济一体化的好处有多大？这项建议概述了一项计划，以促进对这一问题的理解，并开始向公众传播这项工作。这项建议中提出的理论技术的智力价值来自于它们与数据保持着紧密的联系。因此，它们提供了简单且易于分析的关系，将经济一体化和开放的障碍联系在一起，进而将开放和经济福利联系在一起。这项理论工作得到了仔细的量化政策分析的补充。该提案由四个不同的研究项目组成。以前对国际贸易福利收益的评估侧重于不断加价的模型，从而忽视了贸易的所谓有利于竞争的影响。第一个项目计划开发一个统一的框架，以分析具有可变加价的模型中贸易的有利于竞争的影响。主要结果表明，贸易收益与企业的价格传递程度密切相关，这是一个由许多经济学家独立衡量的统计数字。第二个项目旨在通过一个可变加价的模型来提供创新对贸易和福利影响的理论表征。这个项目的目标是了解创新和福利之间的联系，以及有利于竞争的效应如何塑造这种关系。为此，该项目将评估关于需求和竞争结构的不同假设如何影响创新，以及贸易如何加强创新和影响福利。第三个项目开发了一个可无缝适应跨国公司生产的基线贸易框架的延伸，并为了解跨国活动的收益提供了一个新的分析工具。该项目的一个组成部分是开发和实施评估模型的程序。最终成果将是评估减少贸易壁垒和多国活动的政策的有用工具。最后一个项目将试图通过开发一个多国贸易模式来加强动态开放经济模式和静态贸易模式之间的脆弱联系，其中纳入了贸易调整可能需要时间的事实。以这一框架为基础，拟议的项目将研究贸易对宏观经济冲击的动态调整，以及贸易对这些冲击反应迟缓的福利影响。拟议的研究将提供一个框架，以分析形成经济一体化收益的主要力量。它还将提供必要的工具，以利用丰富的国际贸易数据和了解世界经济的运作。这些工具中的一部分将被整合到国际金融本科课程的材料中。本研究议程得出的经济一体化障碍和经济福利之间的简单联系绕过了经济理论的各种抽象，使其成为政策角度上的有用工具。因此，在一个相互依存的世界里，它不仅是教育未来经济学家的理想材料，也是教育政策制定者和其他未来领导人的理想材料。

Abstract Proposal Title: CAREER: Welfare Gains from Economic Integration: A Unified ApproachProposal Number: SES - 1255298Principal Investigator: Arkolakis, KonstantinosThe international trade field has seen a dramatic shift of its research agenda over the past decade. New evidence on the size advantage of exporters has motivated the modeling of firm heterogeneity, resulting in a new analytical framework for international trade. These changes in the field have also lead to a reconsideration of the old pressing question: how large are the gains from economic integration?This proposal outlines a plan to advance the understanding of this question and to begin disseminating this work to the general public. The intellectual merit of the theoretical techniques suggested in this proposal derives from the fact that they maintain a tight link with the data. Thus, they deliver simple and analytically tractable relationships linking barriers to economic integration and openness and, in turn, openness and economic welfare. This theoretical work is complemented by careful quantitative policy analysis. The proposal is composed of four different research projects.Previous assessments of the welfare gains from international trade focus on models with constant markups, thus ignoring the so-called pro-competitive effects of trade. The first project plans to develop a unified framework to analyze the pro-competitive effects of trade in models with variable markups. The main result implies that gains from trade are tightly associated with the degree of price pass-through of firms, a statistic measured independently by many economists.The second project aims to offer a theoretical characterization of the impact of innovation on trade and welfare in a model with variable markups. The goal of this project is to understand the link between innovation and welfare and how pro-competitive effects shape this relationship. For this purpose, the project will assess how different assumptions on the demand and competition structure affect innovation and how trade can intensify innovation and affect welfare.The third project develops an extension of a baseline trade framework that can seamlessly accommodate production of multinational firms and provide a new analytical tool for the understanding of the gains from multinational activity. A component of this project is the development and implementation of a procedure to estimate the model. The end product will be a useful tool for evaluating policies that reduce barriers to trade and multinational activity.The final project will attempt to strengthen the tenuous link between dynamic open economy models and static trade models by developing a multi-country trade model that incorporates the fact that trade adjustment may take time. Using this framework as a basis the proposed project will study the dynamic adjustment of trade to macroeconomic shocks and the welfare implications of the sluggishness of trade responses to these shocks.The proposed research will provide a framework to analyze the main forces that shape the gains from economic integration. It will also provide necessary tools to exploit the rich data on international trade and understand the workings of the world economy. Part of these tools will be integrated to the material of an undergraduate class in International Finance. The simple link between barriers to economic integration and economic welfare derived by this research agenda bypasses the various abstractions of economic theory and makes it a useful tool from a policy perspective. It is thus ideal material for the education of not only future economists but also policy makers and other future leaders in an interdependent world.