Productivity Investment, Power Laws, and Welfare Gains from Trade
2018/06/19
研討會日期 : 2018-06-19
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Dr. Yi-Fan Chen (陳奕帆)
主持人 : Professor Shin-Kun Peng
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Economics at National Taiwan University in 2016. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellows at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. His research fields are Industrial Organization and International Trade.
演講摘要 : We study a trade model with monopolistic competition a la Melitz (2003) that is standard except that firm heterogeneity is endogenously determined by firms investing to enhance their productivities. We show that the equilibrium productivity and firm-size distributions exhibit power-law tails under rather general conditions on demand and technology. We explore the welfare implication of productivity investment, and find that it results in a higher welfare gains from trade than the Melitz-Pareto framework due to productivity investment. Our quantitative analysis shows that, conditional on the same trade elasticity and values of the common parameters, our model yields 36% higher welfare gains from trade than Melitz-Pareto and the margin due to productivity investment alone contributes 31% of the welfare gains.
