Jenny Minier

Is Environmental Policy a Secondary Trade Barrier? An Empirical Analysis

Should international trade agreements be extended to include negotiations over environmental policy? The answer depends on whether countries distort levels of environmental regulations as a secondary means of providing protection to domestic industries; our results suggest that they do. Previous studies of this relationship have treated the level of environmental regulation as exogenous, and found a negligible correlation between environmental regulation and trade flows. In contrast, we find that, when the level of environmental regulation is modeled as an endogenous variable, its estimated effect on trade flows is significantly higher than previously reported.

Democracy and Growth: Alternative Approaches

This article focuses on two previously unexamined aspects of the relationship between economic growth and democracy. First, the growth experiences of countries that experience significant changes in democracy are examined directly. Countries that democratize are found to grow faster than a priori similar countries, while countries that become less democratic grow more slowly than comparable countries. These differences do not seem to be due to differences in education or investment levels. Second, regression tree analysis suggests that democracy, along with initial income and literacy, contributes to the identification of regimes of countries facing similar aggregate production functions.

Trade Liberalization and Pollution Havens

Abstract U.S. Presidential Executive Order 13141 commits the United States to a careful assessment and consideration of the environmental impacts of trade agreements. The most direct mechanism through which trade liberalization would affect environmental quality in the U.S. is through the composition of industries. Freer trade means greater specialization, increasing the concentration of polluting industries in some countries and decreasing it in others. We begin by documenting the substantial shift in U.S. manufacturing toward cleaner industries from 1972 to 1994. We then use annual industry-level data on imports to the U.S. to examine whether this compositional shift can be traced to the significant trade liberalization that occurred over the same time period, and we conclude that no such connection exists. A shift toward cleaner industries has also occurred among U.S. imports, and we find no evidence that pollution-intensive industries have been disproportionately affected by the tariff changes.

Opening a Stock Exchange

A large body of theoretical and empirical literature has established a positive relationship between levels of stock market development and economic growth. However, previous empirical work has been based on samples of approximately 40 countries with the most highly developed financial systems. Since 1950, over 70 countries have opened their first national stock exchanges. Can such exchanges increase economic growth? I present a data set of my construction that describes the exchange openings that occurred between 1960 and 1998, and find that these exchanges have generated increases in growth during their first 5Â years of existence, although the longer-term results are ambiguous.

Nonlinearities and Robustness in Growth Regressions

Cross-country regressions are a well-established means of attempting to uncover the empirical determinants of economic growth. However, in an influential paper, Levine and Renelt (1992) demonstrate that the results of these studies are very sensitive to the choice of conditioning variables. Using a variant of Leamers (1983) extreme bounds test, they show that almost no explanatory variables are robustly correlated with growth. In this paper, I show that this extremely pessimistic conclusion is partly due to the ad hoc assumption of linearity in the traditional growth specification. Specifically, under alternative (nonlinear) specifications, the number of robust variables increases substantially.

Is Democracy a Normal Good? Evidence from Democratic Movements

A frequent assertion of economists and political scientists is that democracy is a normal good, or that higher incomes lead citizens to “desire” more democracy. This assertion, however, has been difficult to test directly. I introduce a data set of democratic movements, and use it to address the relationship between income and the demand for democracy. Logit analysis of the estimated probability that a democratic movement occurs in an authoritarian country suggests that this probability is increasing in income per capita up to a level of approximately

Reconsidering the Empirical Evidence on the Grossman-Helpman Model of Endogenous Protection

5000. Unlike previous results, this does not suggest that all countries will become democratic once they pass some income threshold.

Trade Policy in Majoritarian Systems: The Case of the U.S.

model of endogenous protection as the preeminent model in the political economy of trade literature has been significantly advanced by the finding that its predictions about the cross-industry pattern of protection are broadly consistent with the data. However, in their empirical implementation of the Grossman-Helpman model, researchers have assumed the presence of multiple policy instruments and extraneous political factors. We argue that incorporating these assumptions into the theory significantly changes its predictions about the cross-industry pattern of protection. JEL classification: F1

On the Robustness of Coefficient Estimates to the Inclusion of Proxy Variables

We provide a theory of trade policy determination that incorporates the protectionist bias inherent in majoritarian systems, suggested by Grossman and Helpman (2005). The prediction that emerges is that in majoritarian systems, the majority party favours industries located disproportionately in majority districts. We test this prediction using U.S. data on tariffs, Congressional campaign contributions, and industry location in districts represented by the majority party over the period 1989-97. We find evidence of a significant majority bias in trade policy: the benefit to being represented by the majority party appears at least as large in magnitude as the benefit to lobbying.

When is Trade Protection Good for Growth

Abstract This paper considers the use of multiple proxy measures for an unobserved variable and contrasts the approach taken in the measurement error literature to that of the model specification literature. We find that including all available proxy variables in the regression minimizes the bias on coefficients of correctly measured variables in the regression. We derive a set of bounds for all parameters in the model, and compare these results to extreme bounds analysis. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the performance of our bounds relative to extreme bounds. We conclude with an empirical example from the cross-country growth literature in which human capital is measured through three proxy variables: literacy rates, and enrollment in primary and secondary school, and show that our approach yields results that contrast sharply with extreme bounds analysis.