Three essays on international trade and innovation
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation consists of three essays spanning the topics of international trade and innovation, with specific attention to their underlying legal institutions. In the first chapter, I address the role of non-uniform trade policy in a world where firms are known to be heterogeneous. Since much firm-level policy occurs unilaterally and outside of negotiated most-favored nation tariff rates, exploring governments' strategic incentives in sequential-move environments is of interest. Compared to an existing heterogeneous-firm model with non-uniform tariffs, I add simplifying functional form assumptions that then allow me to add strategic behavior into the model. In particular, I allow one country to act as a Stackelberg leader in setting trade taxes, and I find that it always elects to impose a tax, and that the tax is larger than it would be if the follower were not expected to respond. I also discuss the specific policy avenues that are available to governments for levying non-uniform tariffs on firms and relate the situations in which these avenues may be used to forces and incentives in my model. In the second chapter, joint with Lisa Ouellette, I turn to innovation policy and consider the market for vaccines. We review and synthesize research from a broad array of disciplines including economics, law, and public health, documenting the outsized benefits of vaccines juxtaposed with a seemingly anemic development pipeline. Vaccines have many attributes that are understood in the economic literature to limit the rents that a monopolist can extract. Most importantly, they are durable goods, and they are preventatives. Starting from this understanding, we argue that market-based innovation incentives, such as patents, will under-provide such goods relative to goods without these properties, even though the social benefit of such goods may be far greater. In the third chapter, I consider international patenting flows and leverage the European Patent Office's DOCDB database, which contains detailed international patent bibliographic data, to consider patent application filings as a measure of knowledge diffusion and domestic knowledge production. After describing the international patenting regime and the incentives that drive it, I document a clear relationship between a country's market size and both its domestic knowledge production and its reception of foreign knowledge diffusion. I also find that, although bilateral patent flows resemble bilateral trade flows in that they increase with the size of the source and destination countries, distance does not play as clear a role in moderating patent flows as it does with trade in goods.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2024; ©2024 |
| Publication date | 2024; 2024 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Xue, Qiwei Claire |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Bagwell, Kyle |
| Thesis advisor | Bagwell, Kyle |
| Thesis advisor | Ouellette, Lisa Larrimore |
| Thesis advisor | Williams, Heidi L |
| Degree committee member | Ouellette, Lisa Larrimore |
| Degree committee member | Williams, Heidi L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Qiwei Claire Xue. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2024. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/bs308cr9257 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2024 by Qiwei Claire Xue
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC-SA).
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