Trade, production and exchange rate volatility: Three essays on the international trade of forest products

The rapid growth of international forest products trade makes it important to understand the relationships between industrial structures, exchange rate, trade patterns, volume and prices. This research addressed three questions: (1) The role of market structure in explaining intra-industry trade of forest products, (2) the causal relationship between exports and production of forest products, and (3) the effects of exchange rate volatility on the export volume and price of forest products.;The explanation of intra-industry trade by monopolistic competition theory implies a unit elasticity of exports with respect to production. In the first essay, I studied the existence of such a relationship for eleven forest industries. The hypothesis was tested with panel data from 43 countries from 1961 to 2002. The strongest evidence of monopolistic competition was for the pulp and paper industries. For other forest products, although there was a statistically significant relationship between production and exports, the elasticity was significantly less than unity.;The second essay investigates whether exports are the engine or the consequence of growth in forest industries. I used a bivariate autoregressive distributed lag model of exports and production. The model was estimated with data from China, Finland, and the United States, for eleven forest industries. Inferences were based on the short-run and long-run multipliers from exports to production and from production to exports by industry, and for all industries pooled in a time-series panel. The results supported the endogenous growth hypothesis for China and the United States. For Finland there was a positive feedback between exports and production.;The third essay concerns the effects of exchange-rate volatility on forest products trade. I used monthly volume and price data of U.S. exports of forest products to fourteen countries. The exchange-rate volatility was modeled as a GARCH (1, 1) process. The results suggest that the exchange rate risk has no effect on trade volume in most cases. However, during financial crisis, exchange rate volatility has negative effects on trade volume.