The Effect of Bilateral Labor Agreements on Trade with Mihai Paraschiv in Journal of Economic Integration, 2022
- The period between the end of World War II and the Great Recession is marked by higher degrees of international cooperation aimed at facilitating economic integration among nations. As part of these efforts, national governments adopted policies to remove/reduce barriers that hindered the exchange of goods and services as well as the movement of capital and labor. While the effect of international trade and investment treaties on trade has been thoroughly documented, the impact of labor agreements on commerce flows has received little to no attention. The current paper uses a novel dataset of bilateral labor agreements (BLAs) along with the gravity regression to find that, between 1978 and 2012, (i) BLAs do not appear to impact aggregate export flows but (ii) have a positive and significant effect (i.e., ranging between 4% and 16%) on exports of prepared and unprepared foods, fruits, and beverages irrespective of whether the exporter and importer are the agreement’s source or host country.
Price Elasticity in the Performing Arts: a Segmentation Approach with Eric Kolhede and Tomas Gomez-Arias in Journal of Marketing Analytics, 2022
- Our article examines price sensitivity between subsegments of performing arts consumers. This study contributes to the literature in two ways: first, by the more comprehensive manner in which performing arts consumers are segmented and, second, by comparing subgroups along all elasticity regions (i.e., elastic, unitary and inelastic) of a performing arts demand curve. Structured surveys were administered to nearly 1900 subjects. This study distinctively enriches segmentation analyses by analyzing the price sensitivity between cluster segments defined by psychographic variables and their expectation of marketing mix offerings, yielding three segments of intrinsics, disinclined and impressionable performing arts consumers. We find that price appeals should be primarily directed at intrinsics, a segment of consumers least drawn to performing arts events and with the greatest price sensitivity. PAOs should seek to maintain the greater price inelasticity among intrinsics and impressionables with differential approaches. In targeting intrinsics, PAOs must meet the higher quality expectations these patrons have of the organization’s core artistic product. Price inelasticity among impressionables can be achieved through targeted programming and advertising efforts to these consumers, a group more susceptible to the influence of external factors affecting buying behavior.
A Stroll Down the Dollar Street: Teaching Per-Capita GDP Using Internationally-Comparable Photographs with Mihai Paraschiv and Steve M. Muchiri in Journal of Economics Teaching, 2022
- We propose an activity that draws on over 44,000 internationally comparable photographs (of households and their living conditions) that help students connect cross-country differences in real per-capita GDP with differences in living conditions. First, students virtually visit approximately twenty households across five countries (four of their choice and the United States) and document their living conditions. Second, students collect real GDP per capita data for these countries, compare it, and link it to the observed differences in living conditions. Ultimately, this process allows the students to understand how differences in real GDP per capita relate to the differences in living conditions and learn some of the advantages and disadvantages of using real per-capita GDP to measure living conditions
"Differential Effect of Immigrants and Refugees on Bilateral Trade with their Home Countries" (Working Paper)
- Employing data on refugees and immigrants from 134 countries of origin and 14 destination countries for the years 1990-2005, I compare the extent to which refugees and immigrants deferentially affect trade (exports and imports) with their home countries, and provide the first evidence of this differential refugee–immigrant trade effect for the world sample. Using the high–dimensional fixed effect estimation allows me to control for unobserved time–varying multilateral resistance terms, I find that immigrants have a small positive impact on both exports and imports from their home countries while refugees, do not have an effect on either exports or imports. High dimensional fixed effects estimation has not been previously applied within the immigration trade literature. Previous research estimated the effect of immigrants on trade to be between 4–7 percent (6–9 percent) on exports (imports), respectively. Controlling for time–varying multilateral resistance terms allows for a better estimation of the effect of immigration on trade, and finds little evidence of immigrants and refugees on trade with their home countries.
"Effect of Differential Fertility on Cross-Country Human Capital Accumulation" with Maria Apostolova-Mihaylova (Working Paper)
- This paper explores the cross–country differences in educational attainments, taking differential fertility rates into account. The differential fertility rate is the difference between fertility rates of women with low educational attainment and the fertility rates of women with high educational attainment. In a country where differential fertility is high, lower–educated women have more children than highly educated women but, due to the highly persistent intergenerational transmission of human capital, the many children born to lower–educated women also tend to have less education, decreasing the future aggregate educational attainment and, potentially, reducing growth through the human capital channel. In a sample of 48 countries, we find that the initial differential fertility rate is negatively correlated with the future average years of schooling, while the relationship between the differential fertility rate and primary enrollment ratio is positive. We also find that the correlation between differential fertility and the average years of schooling is negative for more equal countries (Gini coefficients below 58.8) and is positive for less equal countries (Gini coefficients above 58.8). In contrast, differential fertility does not have a statistically significant effect on future educational attainment when controlling for a heterogeneous marginal effect based on the initial level of educational attainment.