Institutional setting and networks effect on international trade : Three essays on international trade
      
      
        
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
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      Thèse de doctorat: Università della Svizzera italiana, 2018
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
       
      
      
      
        
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          This thesis explores the role of different measures of proximity on some topics related to  international trade. We focus on how institutional setting (institutional proximity) and network  structure (cognitive and social proximity) influence the geography of international trade. In the  first chapter, we extend the results of Rose and Spiegel (2011) and the findings by Bista  (2017) proposing a source of heterogeneity for the Olympic effect: the institutional channel.  We prove that the Olympic effect is only a member of the broader Mega-events effect and we  find different liberalization behaviors among legal families after bidding for the event. In the  second chapter, we apply a new index of bargaining power in communications network to the  choice of invoicing currency. Our bargaining index is derived implementing the Calvo- Aremngol (2001) index in a weighted and directed network. Our aim is to understand whether  the exporter and importer’s sector bargaining powers (defined by the relative trade positions  in the network of communications) have a role in the currency choice. With highly  disaggregated Italian export and import customs data, we document a significant impact on  the invoicing currency decision of our bargaining power index. Importers (exporters) with  greater bargaining power tend to price their traded goods in the local (producer) currencies. In  the third chapter of this thesis, we incorporate the empirical evidence of “extended gravity”  and spatial exporter effects into the gravity model of trade with heterogeneous firms  developed by Chaney (2008). Introducing country pairs and spatially correlated preferences in  the consumers’ utility, we explain most of the network effects found by previous scholars. Our  results are confirmed in a structural estimation of the model on a subset of products and  countries. We identify the spatial correlation parameter of consumers’ preferences  considering, in a custom union, the ratio of export to the same country from different  countries, in order to control for observed and unobserved fixed costs to export, using a  Monte Carlo Markov Chain (HMC) estimator.
        
        
       
      
      
      
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
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                  Economics
                
              
            
          
        
 
        
        
        
          
        
        
        
          
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
        
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          https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1319381