Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Duy Nguyen

Date

2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Economics

Committee Chair

Joonhyung Lee

Committee Member

Carl Bjuggren

Committee Member

Jaerim Choi

Committee Member

Albert Okunade

Abstract

In the first essay, hedonic regression on transaction data is the favored method to measure the impact of adverse environmental characteristics. However, this method only weakly identifies the direct causal relationship of unfavorable factors on house prices. The paper found a weak negative impact of 23% on the house price index in the early stage between treatment and control zip code using a robust two-way fixed effects estimation. The diagnostic of the two-way fixed effects estimators found no issues with negative weights, but the sites exhibit a wide range of heterogeneous treatment effects. In the second essay, we found empirically that firms with operational flexibility in terms of existing foreign subsidiaries cope better with the trade uncertainty from 6% to 20% advantage of annual revenue differences to their counterpart without foreign subsidiaries. The paper also found non-significant differences in annual turnover between large Chinese manufacturers with just domestic subsidiaries compared to their purely domestic manufacturers in facing the trade war. In the third essay, we use causal forests to evaluate the heterogeneous effects of US and China trade war. While US imports from China have decreased by 70% on average after the tariff, causal forests at the HS10 digit product level reveals that the effects range from -800% to +180%. We explore the substitution effect from China to Vietnam and Mexico. The exports of both countries to the US show little change on average. However, the effects range from -200% to +200% in Vietnam and those for Mexico is from -400% to +200%. We found that the products with higher MNC activity have been hit hard by the tariff in China, but exports of these products from Vietnam have increased. In addition, utilization of outsourcing professional services and temporary workers tend to be high in these products in Vietnam. These findings suggest that MNCs located in China, especially in light industries that are easy to move because of flexible labor market access appear to relocate to Vietnam to avoid the tariffs. Such tendency is not found in Mexico, however.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest

Notes

Embargoed until 8/8/2024

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