Globalization, Monetary Policy and Labor Market Dynamics

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays that examine macroeconomic implications of trade liberalization. There has been a long-lasting debate on how trade openness influences the effectiveness of monetary policy. The first two essays provide a novel empirical and theoretical investigation into this issue. Motivated by recent new phenomena in U.S. labor market, the third essay is a work in progress that seeks to explore the evolution of U.S. manufacturing employment structural dynamics, and its connection with import competition. The first essay uses annual data of US manufacturing industries at 4-digit SIC level from 1972 to 2005 to conduct the empirical analysis. It shows that trade openness is negatively associated with industry-level effect of monetary policy, and at a given degree of trade openness, industries that involve in offshoring don't necessarily exhibit weaker responses. These empirical findings are hard to reconcile with the implications of standard open economy New Keynesian model, which indicates that trade openness strengthens the effectiveness of monetary policy and doesn't model offshoring separately. The second essay provides a new open economy New Keynesian model that can explain the empirical findings in the first essay. The model features endogenously determined international trade pattern based on Ricardian trade theory, and one-way offshoring from the advanced economy to the less developed one. This model highlights a new channel through which trade openness influences the monetary transmission mechanism: a decline in both trade and offshoring costs raises labor demand elasticity. Trade openness weakens the effects of monetary policy changes on output and inflation by dampening the responses of the domestic labor market. The calibrated model indicates that, when the economy moves from trade and financial autarky to a modern trade regime with an incomplete international financial market, the monetary policy shocks have 22% less of an effect on real GDP and consumer price inflation. The third essay provides the motivation on why to explore the evolution of U.S. manufacturing employment structural dynamics, introduces the methodology, and describes the dataset as well as future works.