Research

My research examines the relationship between international trade and environmental outcomes. In particular, I study recent developments in international trade related to global value chains, multi-country input-output linkages, and multinational production and their impact on airborne pollution. I use theoretical, empirical, and quantitative methods to analyze these issues. You can find more in my research statement.

This paper examines the impact of intermediate trade on air pollution emissions. It builds a model of heterogeneous firms with intermediate trade, emission, and technology adoption, which shows that lower intermediate trade costs reduce emissions due to input substitution, cleaner technology adoption, and reallocation towards cleaner firms. The empirical analysis then tests and finds support for the model prediction on the determinants of aggregate emission intensity using the US manufacturing panel data for 1996-2014. A quantitative analysis shows that the decrease in intermediate import cost alone explains about 8-10% of the observed reduction in the energy- usage-related aggregate emission intensity for nitrogen oxide (NOx) in the US between 1998 and 2014.

Preferential Trade Agreements and Multinational Production

This paper estimates the effect of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on firms’ deci- sions on multinational production (MP). Using bilateral panel data on OECD countries’ MP activities and PTA relationships from 1985 to 2014, I estimate the effect of PTAs by Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) and linear probability model (LPM) methods. I do not find an effect of PTAs on MP on average, while their effect on exports is positive and significant. By using a rich dataset on the contents of PTAs, I measure each PTA’s depth in terms of MP and market access (MA) and separate their effects on MP. PTAs have mixed effects on MP: while PTAs encourage MP by lowering MP costs, they also promote trade by lowering trade barriers, which replaces some of MP motives. Using MP and MA depth measures, I find that PTAs increase MP via provisions facilitating services, business environment, capital and investment, and labor after controlling for trade barriers via tariffs and PTAs’ MA depth.

Works in progress

Curse of Gravity: Welfare Gains from Trade with Traveling Pollutants (with Eunhee Lee)

Preferential Trade Agreements, Multinational Production, and Emissions