As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Yuan Tian, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, at the University of Nottingham. We are pleased to host this talk in collaboration with the Geneva Trade and Development Workshop.
She will present her work titled Trade Disruptions along the Global Supply Chain.
Abstract: We study the impact of local disruptive shocks on international trade flows during the pandemic. Using rich product-level import data from Colombia, we show that in aggregate, import collapse at the onset of the pandemic was due to a decrease in import quantities, and the import recovery in later periods was partially explained by a rise in foreign export prices and shipping costs. We then study the impact of local human mobility declines on imports, including the mobility declines experienced in exporter cities, ports, and importer cities. We find that a 10% decrease in mobility at the importer location lowered imports to that location by 4.8%, and that a 10% decrease in mobility at the exporter location led to a 2.5% decline in imports. Using data on port calls made by container ships, we document a decline in port productivity during the pandemic. We show that mobility changes in ports induced a decline in port efficiency and a rise in freight costs, both at the origin country and at the intermediate country. We show that the results are consistent with a trade model featuring local labor shocks and short-run production and shipping congestion.
For those interested, the full paper is available here.
About the speaker
Yuan Tian received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Before joining the University of Nottingham, she worked at Carnegie Mellon University from 2018 to 2020 as a postdoc researcher. She is an applied-micro economist working at the intersection of trade and development, and her research focuses on how increased opportunities in trade and migration affect economic institutions, economic outcomes, and individual behavior.