Three essays on trade costs and national borders
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Date
02/07/2014Author
Myers, Nicholas
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Abstract
Individuals of the same country buy and sell from each other far more than they
do with individuals of a different country. A cost is associated with exchanging goods
and service across national boundaries. Economists have had difficulty, however, in
reconciling the small observable trade frictions with the very large trade reducing
effect of borders. In the first chapter of this thesis, we propose an explanation which
explains a great deal of the border puzzle between the United States and Canada.
Few observable trade frictions exist which prevent the buying and selling of goods
across this border, yet Canadian provinces and American states trade far more with
themselves than they do with each other. Using a novel data set on Facebook
friendship connections between North American regions, we uncover a substantial
home bias in social linkages between the United States and Canada. Simply put,
Canadians and Americans do not know each other very well. Social networks are
important for trade in that they reduce information costs and increase the efficacy
of informal trust mechanisms. We find that including social linkages in a gravity
model substantially mediates the effect of the US-Canada border on trade. In the
second chapter of this thesis, we focus on how trade costs are formed. Workhorse
models of international trade typically assume, for great simplicity, that trade costs
are exogenous to trade. We present a model in which the act of trading affects the
cost of trade and vice versa. We focus on the trade cost associated with informal
trust mechanisms. A great deal of evidence exists which shows that ceteris paribus,
countries that trust each other trade far more with each other. In our model, trust
is a necessary condition for trade to exist, but trust can only be formed through
repeated interaction. This creates a supermodular game between would-be traders
of the same country. Broadly speaking, two equilibria exist in this game. One with
trust and trade, and one without trust and without trade. This framework highlights
the importance of trade missions as a coordinating device. In the final chapter, based
on a joint work, we assess the welfare implications of political separation. Because
borders dramatically reduce trade, what happens when national borders are created
when they once did not exist? The focus of this chapter is on the Basque Country
in Spain, in which there is a strong pressure for full political separation. While it is
certainly difficult to say what exactly would happen to the cost of trading between
the Basque Country and the rest of Spain if political separation occurred, we use the
cost of trade between Portugal and Spain as a benchmark. That is, we ask what the
welfare implications would be if the cost of trade between the Basque Country and
the rest of Spain were equal to the cost of trade between Portugal and Spain. We
find that increasing trade costs in this manner would decrease the Basque Country's
real income by more than 12%.