Category: Academic Theory

A signpost to useful information on the academic theories and frameworks used in the international business and global strategy literature.

Global Risk Sharing through Trade in Goods and Assets: Theory and Evidence

Exporting not only provides firms with profit opportunities, but can also provide for risk diversification if demand is imperfectly correlated across countries. This paper shows that the correlation pattern of demand shocks across countries constitutes a hitherto unexplored source of comparative advantage that shapes trade flows and persists even if financial markets are complete. With exporters making market- specific choices under uncertainty, countries whose shocks are riskier, in the sense that they contribute more to aggregate volatility, are less attractive destinations for both investment and exports. A gravity-type regression lends support to the hypothesis that, conditional on trade costs and market size, exporters sell smaller quantities in riskier destinations>>ClickHere>>>

rom Theory to Policy with Gravitas: A Solution to the Mystery of the Excess Trade Balances

Bilateral trade balances often play an important role in the international trade policy debate. Academic economists understand that they are misleading indicators of competitiveness and of the gains from trade. However, they also recognize their political relevance, calling for accurate statistical measurement and for more scholarly work. Disturbingly, Davis and Weinstein (2002) argue that the canonical gravity model of trade fails when confronted with bilateral trade balances data, dubbing this “The Mystery of the Excess Trade Balances”. Capitalizing on the latest developments in the theoretical and empirical gravity literature, we demonstrate that the workhorse international trade model actually performs well in explaining bilateral trade balances. Moreover, in our data, only 11 to 13% of the variance in bilateral balances is due to asymmetric trade costs, belying beliefs that bilateral imbalances are driven by ‘unfair’ manipulation of terms-of-trade. We also perform several general equilibrium experiments within the same structural gravity framework to show that free trade agreements tend to exacerbate bilateral imbalances and that macroeconomic rebalancing leads to adjustment with all trade partners>>ClickHere>>>

Heckscher-Ohlin Trade, Leontief Trade, and Factor Conversion Trade When Countries Have Different Technologies

This is another big challenge for international economics after Leontief paradox. This paper demonstrates that there are three trade types in international trade: the Heckscher-Ohlin trade, the Leontief trade, and the conversion trade, by using the 2 × 2 × 2 Trefler model. The conversion trade occurs when the model structure is with FIRs. The conversion trade is one that one country exports the commodity that uses its scarce factor intensively; another country exports the commodity that uses its abundant factor intensively. The conversion trade actually is the trade with factor content reversal2, i.e. that if one country exports the services of capital and imports the services of labor, another country does the same. This study demonstrates that both the Leontief trade and the conversion trade are rooted in the Heckscher-Ohlin theories. The three trade types are under the generalized trade pattern that each country exports the commodity that uses its effective (virtual) 3 abundant factor intensively and imports the commodity that uses its effective (virtual) scarce factor intensively <<ClickHere>>>

Using history to help refine international business theory: ownership advantages and the eclectic paradigm

By drawing on historical evidence on the evolution of a group of leading marketing-based multinationals in consumer goods, this paper claims that, despite its richness, the eclectic paradigm, and in particular the concept of ‘ownership advantages’, needs to be revised and extended, to take into account different levels of institutional analysis >>ClickHere>>>

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