RIEB, Kobe University

Workshop on:Trade, Migration and Their Impacts in the East Asia Time Zone
(Jointly supported by: RIEB Seminar / Rokko Forum / Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A))

Date&Time	Tuesday, August 29, 2017, 10:00am-5:30pm
Place	RIEB Meeting Room (Annex, 2nd Floor)
Intended Audience	Faculties, Graduate Students, Undergraduates, and Managers for Technology and Product Development at Manufacturers
Language	English
Note	Copies of the paper will be available at Office of Promoting Research Collaboration.

10:00am-10:50am

Speaker	Miaojie YU
Affiliation	National School of Development, Peking University / RIEB, Kobe University
Speaker	Wei TIAN
Affiliation	University of Internatinal Business and Economics / RIEB, Kobe University
Topic	Input Trade Liberalization and Import Switching

11:00am-11:50am

Speaker	Weimin HU
Affiliation	Department of Public Finance, National Chengchi University
Topic	Automobile Sales and the Chinese Boycotts of 2012

11:50pm-1:30pm

Lunch Break

1:30pm-2:20pm

Speaker	Takumi NAITO
Affiliation	Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University
Topic	Growth and Welfare Effects of Unilateral Trade Liberalization with Heterogeneous Firms and Asymmetric Countries
Abstract	How do reallocations across heterogeneous firms induced by unilateral trade liberalization affect long-run growth and welfare? To answer this question, we formulate a two-country model of endogenous growth, heterogeneous firms, and asymmetric countries. The relative wage and number of domestic varieties are endogenously determined. We show that even unilateral trade liberalization can raise the balanced growth rate. Although growth-enhancing trade liberalization is always welfare-enhancing in the symmetric country case, it does not generally ensure higher long-run welfare for at most one country because of asymmetric real wage effects caused by a change in the relative number of varieties.

2:30pm-3:20pm

Speaker	Bing LI
Affiliation	School of International Trade and Economics, Central University of Finance & Economics
Topic	Immunizing from the Terror: China's New Comparative Advantage?
Abstract	This study empirically investigates the impact of terrorist attacks on bilateral trade between Belt & Road countries and China comparing with other countries by employing the gravity model augmented with terrorism indexes, based on a panel data set from 1984 to 2014 covering 186 countries. We find that Belt & Road countries, where terrorist attacks happened more frequently, trade more with China comparing with other countries, which seems a new comparative advantage of China. We further test two possible mechanisms from both supply side and demand side. From the supply side, Chinese tend to take more risk than others when they encounter terrorist attacks, which may due to the lower value of statistical life (VSL) of Chinese; from demand side, terrorists have less incentives to attack Chinese because China's foreign policy of mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs gains kindness from the local populace. Our findings are robust through series of robustness checks by including various control variables, replacing various measurements of terrorism indexes, adopting instrumental variable approach, and implementing alternative empirical specifications of the gravity model.

3:30pm-4:20pm

Speaker	Lex ZHAO
Affiliation	RIEB, Kobe University
Topic	International Talent Inflow and Chinese Exports: Firm Level Analysis
Abstract	We offer a new perspective to explain the rapid growth of Chinese exports, by empirically testing the impacts of international talent inflow (ITI) on Chinese exports from two levels: the firm level and the country level. We find that at the country level, ITI significantly increases the scale of Chinese exports, at both the extensive margin (numbers of export firms) and intensive margin (average exports per firm), but with greater impact on the former margin. In contrast, at the firm level, the effect on the intensive margin (average value per product) is higher than on the extensive margin (the number of products). Further, the export-promoting effect of ITI is stronger on differentiated products than on homogeneous products, on medium-sized firms than on large or small firms, on foreign-owned firms than on domestically owned firms (state- owned or private-owned), and on firms in coastal regions than inland. As for multi- product exporters, ITI can significantly decrease the relative export sales of their core products, but increase the diversification of export products. Robustness checks with different samples, using multiple methods and different fixed effects including time lags confirm our results.

4:30pm-5:20pm

Speaker	Zhiyuan LI
Affiliation	School of Economics, Fudan University
Topic	Terms of Trade Gains from Task Offshoring & Complementarity between Tasks
Abstract	In this paper, I show that there are terms of trade effects associated with task offshoring. The offshoring source country may enjoy terms of trade gains associated with offshoring when the elasticity of substitution between tasks is low. These gains may stem from technology transfer from the source to the destination country or from the productivity improvement in the offshoring destination. Importantly, the offshoring destination country may suffer a total welfare loss due to the terms of trade effects. I illustrate that the source country will enjoy larger terms of trade gains when the elasticity of substitution between tasks is smaller and when the comparative advantage schedule has a steeper slope at the cutoff task.