Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
8-2020
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
Economics
Major Professor
Georg Schaur
Committee Members
Charles B. Sims, Scott M. Gilpatric, Bogdan C. Bichescu
Abstract
My dissertation consists of two essays in international trade and environmental economics. In the first essay, which consists of three substantial parts, I investigate whether internationalization can address the problem of female informality in the developing countries’ labor markets. In the first part, I examine the impact of exports and industrial zones on women's informality. In the second part, I investigate whether Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) can reduce women's informality. Additionally, I look at whether the effect of FDI is heterogeneous due to the respective gender norms prevalent within FDI source countries. In the third part, I examine whether results from part I and part II change when export and FDI are studied together in a joint specification. To measure female informality in the firms, I use an index based on women's share in total labor and women's share in informal labor. Using Vietnam's firm level data, I find evidence that foreign-owned firms and firms located in industrial zones reduce female informality. I do not find conclusive results for the effect of the firms’ export status on women's informality. I control for endogeneity issues using estimated total factor productivity, fixed effects at various levels, and heteroscedasticity generated instrument. My results are robust to multiple specifications and multiple sub-samples of the data.
The second essay investigates the importance of environmental policy uncertainty. Based on existing newspaper-based approaches, I construct a measure of environmental policy uncertainty using the frequency of articles mentioning uncertainties related to environmental policies. I use this measure as a proxy for environmental policy uncertainty to investigate its impact on macro and firm level economic variables. I find that environmental policy uncertainty is significant at both macro and firm level. More specifically, I find that the environmental policy uncertainty is linked with fall in aggregate industrial production. Furthermore, I find that it causes increase in firm-level uncertainty and decrease in firm-level investment of firms active in industries sensitive to environmental policies.
Recommended Citation
Palikhe, Himadri, "Essays on International Trade and Environmental Economics. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2020.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/6908