Essays in international trade : international fragmentation of production and trade costs

Abstract

In this dissertation, I contribute to the thriving empirical literature in international trade by looking specifically at the international fragmentation of production and non-traditional trade costs. In chapter 1, using the new features of global input-output tables, I quantify the impact of the recent changes in foreign input use on the factor content of trade. I found that the changes in the factor content of trade are driven by each country position in the global supply chains. The chapter 2 analyzes the links between political relations and trade in light of the growing interdependency between countries. In this joint work with Julian Hinz, using a new proxy fora negative shock to political relations between countries, we show that the impact of such a negative shock is crucially heterogeneous across traded goods. Finally, in chapter 3 co-authored with Julian Hinz, we introduce a new measure for spoken languages based on Twitter data. We then use this measure to evaluate the effect of changes in language diversity on trade and real income in different locations in Europe.