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Essays on Production Structure and Economic Integration https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.96598 Smitkova, Lidia Cavalcanti, Tiago In this dissertation, I present three chapters that study the linkages between the structural makeup of economies and the process of trade- and financial liberalization. In the first chapter I examine the role of trade and external deficits in explaining the patterns of structural change in twenty developed and developing economies between 1965 and 2000. First, for each country, I break down the time series of manufacturing value added share into a secular trend and a trade-induced deviation from the trend. I show that national differences are in large part due to trade. Second, I investigate changes in sectoral productivity, trade costs and trade deficits as the driving forces behind the patterns in the data. To do this I build a multi-sector Eaton and Kortum (2002) model and simulate the effects of different shocks on the manufacturing value added shares in the sample. While calibrating the model, I develop a novel method of identifying trade cost- and productivity shocks, which makes use of symmetry restrictions on sectoral trade cost shocks. I calibrate the model at a two-digit level of disaggregation, which permits me to study not only the changes in the manufacturing share, but also its composition at a sub-sectoral level. I find that open economy forces are responsible for 32% of the observed change in the manufacturing shares in my sample, and for 39% if the composition of the manufacturing sector is taken into account. Focusing on individual shocks, I show that for the aggregate manufacturing share, trade cost- and aggregate trade deficit shocks played the biggest role, whereas the productivity shocks mattered more in driving the composition of manufacturing. In the second chapter, I study financial liberalization between economies that differ in their overall competitiveness. I first show that if firms compete oligopolistically, then competitiveness --- relatively low aggregate unit costs of production --- is a feature of an economy with a fatter tailed productivity distribution and relatively more very large --- `superstar’ --- firms. Embedding this setup in a two-country model with heterogeneous agents and non-homothetic saving behaviour, I show that if the home is more competitive, then: (1) it enjoys a higher aggregate profit rate than foreign; (2) its autarkic interest rate is lower than that in foreign; (3) should the two economies undergo financial liberalization, the capital will be flowing from home to foreign; (4) if one of the sectors is non-tradable, the capital inflows push up the wages in foreign, leading to further losses of competitiveness and to current account overshooting. In the third chapter, I calibrate the quantitative version of the model developed in Chapter 2 to eight European economies on the eve of the Global Financial Crisis. I show that the competitiveness gap can explain 27% of variation in the current account imbalances incurred in the period. I conclude by discussing policies for rebalancing. University of Cambridge 2022-06-04 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/349668 https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/15c309eb-eb6f-4fee-b7ab-177d5ff365c0/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/fbb8afa5-3deb-4585-826c-38898d8cb394/download d281a95a4b219aa158ad8531071ce49f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved capital flows international macroeconomics structural change trade