Collaborative Research: International Trade, Firms and Welfare under Policy Uncertainty

跨国买卖产品的公司往往必须在没有充分了解未来政府政策的情况下做出重要决定。例如，一家出口公司可能不得不决定是否投资于一种新的生产技术，即使该公司不确定未来的贸易政策将影响其客户。该奖项资助了一个研究项目，旨在衡量贸易政策的不确定性对企业投资和出口决策的影响。这些数据将使该团队能够在最近的两个事件中衡量这种不确定性的影响：大衰退和最近中国经济与世界其他地区的全球一体化。该项目建立了一个基本框架，用于建模和估计贸易政策不确定性对投资和出口决策的影响。该框架包含几个关键因素：(i)政策改革的一般均衡效应；（ii）一套足够广泛的投资，以纳入创新和投入选择；(3)与纯粹经济不确定性的相互作用；(4)内生的贸易政策不确定性。该模型是用确定的微观数据估计的。

Firms that buy and sell products across international borders often must make important decisions without full information about future government policies. For example, a exporting firm may have to decide whether or not to invest in a new production technology even though the firm is uncertain about future trade policies that will affect its customers. This award funds a research project that seeks to measure the effects of uncertainty about trade policy on firms' investment and export decisions. The data will allow the team to measure the effects of such uncertainty during two recent events: the Great Recession and the recent global integration of the Chinese economy with the rest of the world.The project builds a basic framework for modeling and estimating the impact of trade policy uncertainty on investment and export decisions. The framework incorporates several key factors: (i) general equilibrium effects of policy reform; (ii) a set of investments that is broad enough to incorporate innovation and input choice; (iii) the interaction with pure economic uncertainty and (iv) endogenous trade policy uncertainty. The model is estimated with firm microdata.