Daniel MIRZA

This paper highlights different channels through which natural disasters affect exports of agricultural products in developing countries, along different mechanisms arising from supply and demand. By using disaster variables (occurrence and intensity) from EM-DAT and GeoMet datasets with trade data at the 6 digit-HS level, our first estimates point to a non-robust relationship between disasters and agricultural exports from developing countries. We then argue that this non-statistical relationship hides two opposite effects: one supply effect negative on exports (i.e. reduction in capabilities of production); and a foreign demand effect (ie. altruism hypothesis), positive on exports. Using complementary data sources on a subset of products at hand, we could detect a supply effect. More interestingly, we were able to estimate a new demand effect across many alternative identifying variables, methods and controls. The detection of this positive effect, consistent with foreign consumers’ altruism, is new in the literature. It explains at least partly why disasters might not lead to very important falls in exports in developing countries.

This paper is the first to uncover in details the impact of different families of disasters on exports from 1979 to 2000 (storms, floods, earthquakes and changes in temperatures). Besides, our paper is the first to compare in a quasi-systematic way the results across the two datasets at hand, the standard \emph{EM-DAT} data and \emph{GeoMet} data, a newly available dataset based on geophysical and meteorological data (\citet{Felbermayr2013} and \citet{Felbermayr2014}). We run series of regressions while accounting progressively for the characteristics of products (all traded goods v/s agriculture ones), the characteristics of the country (size, level of development) and the intensity of the catastrophes. When pooling all countries, and all types of disasters, we do not find any statistical impact on exports. But when focusing on each of them separately and on agricultural goods, the occurrence of an earthquake appears to reduce exports of about 3\%, regardless of its location. A windstorm shock, even when it happens to be very severe, has hardly any impact. A flood, on its side, is estimated to reduce export flows of a small country by nearly 3\%. The effect of changes in temperatures is ambiguous. All in all, except for temperatures related disasters, the results are consistent across both datasets, EM-DAT and GeoMet, although they appear to be slightly more in line with our expectations in the case of GeoMet.

This paper studies how network-related terrorism redistributes trade flows across countries, including those countries that are not a direct source of terror. We first develop a game theoretical framework with imperfect information on the spatial location of transnational terrorism to show how the resulting security measures produce a non-monotonic effect on the distribution of trade across countries. Neighbors adjacent to terror, even when they do not source it, have trade reduced through enhanced security measures, while countries farther away benefit from those security measures. Second, to empirically assess the distortional effects of terrorism on trade, we first estimate the structural gravity equation derived from our theory. Then, armed with the estimates of the partial effect of neighbor terror on bilateral trade, we perform a counterfactual experiment and confirm the non-monotonic general equilibrium effect of neighbor terror on trade.

Out-migration concerns foreigners who decide to leave a country where they used to live. Taking advantage of the OECD bilateral IMS database, we analyze the short-run determinants of out-migration using a panel of Schengen countries between 1995 and 2011. We find that out-migration is counter-cyclical: foreign nationals tend to leave host countries with high unemployment, while they are likelier to stay in good times (i.e. low unemployment). Typically, a 10 % increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 5 % increase in out-migration. Thus, short-term economic fluctuations have the same qualitative effect as restrictive migration policies in economic downturns. However, we find mixed evidence for the role of economic cycles in the potential destination countries of those flows. Movers appear to be sensitive to unemployment changes in their country of origin, but they do not seem to be sensitive to business cycles in potential destinations.

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This paper adds to the scant literature on the impact of terrorism on consumer behavior, focusing on household spending on goods that are sensitive to brain-stress neurocircuitry. These include sweet-and fat-rich foods but also home necessities and female-personal-hygiene products, the only female-targeted good in our data. We examine unique continuous in-homescanner expenditure data for a representative sample of about 15,000 French households, observed in the days before and after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert-hall. We find that the attack increased expenditure on sugar-rich food by over 5% but not that on salty food or soda drinks. Spending on home maintenance products went up by almost 9%. We detect an increase of 23.5% in expenditure on women's personal hygiene products. We conclude that these effects are short-lived and driven by the responses of households with children, youths, and those residing within a few-hours ride of the place of the attack.

This paper tries to identify the different channels through which natural disasters affect exports of agricultural products in developing countries. It begins by presenting a simple theory set-up that highlights the different mechanisms at work. It then takes some predictions of this theory to the test. Matching different sets of disaster variables (occurrence and intensity) from EM-DAT and GeoMet datasets with trade data at the 6 digit-HS level, our first estimate point to a negative but statistically non-robust relation between disasters and agricultural exports. Following our theory set-up, we attribute this result to mixing three confounding effects with different magnitudes and opposite signs on trade. Using other sources of data, we could then identify two of the effects: a negative and statistically significant effect of disasters on exports when they occur in rural areas and at growing seasons times; and a positive and (very) robust relation with exports towards culturally close partners and where an important diaspora is settled. This points to show that disasters are redistributing exports across partners. However, the ’solidarity’- consistent effect does not seem to last over time. All in all, notably due to the limited physical impact of most of the disasters over time and space and thanks to the pain relief provided by culturally close importers, natural disasters do not appear to make small developing countries suffer that much economically.

In order to promote international trade in services, the WTO-GATS aims at progressively eliminating discriminatory regulations, which apply to foreign suppliers, byguaranteeing equal national treatment. This paper looks instead at the trade effect of domestic regulations, which apply to all firms indifferently and do not intend to exclude foreign suppliers. We propose a theory-based empirical test to determine whether or not these domestic regulations affect foreign suppliers more than local ones. We take this test to the data by using French firm-level exports of professional services to OECD countries. Our econometric results show that domestic regulations in the importing markets matter significantly for trade in services. They reduce both the decision to export and the individual exports. These results tend to prove that domestic regulations are de facto discriminatory even if they are not de jure.