Openness, Volatility and the Risk Content of Exports
Abstract
It has been observed that more open countries experience higher output growth volatility. This paper uses an industry-level panel dataset of manufacturing production and trade to analyze the mechanisms through which trade can affect the volatility of production. We find that sectors with higher trade are more volatile and that trade leads to increased specialization. These two forces act to increase overall volatility. We also find that sectors which are more open to trade are less correlated with the rest of the economy, an effect that acts to reduce aggregate volatility. The point estimates indicate that each of the three effects has an appreciable impact on aggregate volatility. Added together they imply that a one standard deviation change in trade openness is associated with an increase in aggregate volatility of about 15% of the mean volatility observed in the data. The results are also used to provide estimates of the welfare cost of increased volatility under several sets of assumptions. We then propose a summary measure of the riskiness of a country's pattern of export specialization, and analyze its features across countries and over time. There is a great deal of variation in countries' risk content of exports, but it does not have a simple relationship to the level of income or other country characteristicsDownload Info
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Paper provided by Society for Economic Dynamics in its series 2006 Meeting Papers with number 86.Length:
Date of creation: 03 Dec 2006
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:red:sed006:86
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Postal: Society for Economic Dynamics Christian Zimmermann Economic Research Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis PO Box 442 St. Louis MO 63166-0442 USA
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Related research
Keywords: Trade; Output Volatility; Risk Content of Exports;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade
- F40 - International Economics - - Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance - - - General
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2007-01-13 (All new papers)
- NEP-INT-2007-01-13 (International Trade)
References
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Paolo Epifani & Gino Gancia, 2005.
"Openness, government size and the terms of trade,"
Economics Working Papers
915, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, revised Jan 2008.
- Paolo Epifani & Gino Gancia, 2009. "Openness, Government Size and the Terms of Trade," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 76(2), pages 629-668.
- Paolo Epifani & Gino Gancia, 2008. "Openness, Government Size and the Terms of Trade," IEW - Working Papers 359, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - University of Zurich.
- Olaberria, Eduardo & Rigolini, Jamele, 2009. "Managing East Asia's macroeconomic volatility," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4989, The World Bank.
- Liu, Xuan, 2007. "Trade Openness and the Cost of Sudden Stops: The Role of Financial Friction," MPRA Paper 18260, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 26 Oct 2009.
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