Essays on international trade

This doctoral dissertation presents three papers which contribute to fill three trade literature gaps from a novel methodological perspective:

• Chapter 1 proposes a two-step methodology to measure managerial skills specific to the international market. This empirical approach presents some advantages over the methodologies implemented so far to measure managerial quality. For example, it could be replicated for other countries (the paper was calculated with Colombian data) since it just requires to merge customs and financial statement datasets at firm-year level.  This paper was published at the World Economy journal.

• Chapter 2 argues that exports could be one of the missing pieces to solve the "dividend puzzle" (term implemented in the literature to describe the lack of consensus about why firms pay dividends). The econometric specification allows to evaluate firms’ dividend policy adjustment in response to exogenous export demand shocks and test the testable predictions of some dividend theories. The paper presents two novelties: i) it mixes in an innovative way trade and corporate finance literature, and ii) it calculates heterogeneous effect of exports on dividend policy disaggregated by the international managerial quality variable calculated in the first paper, allowing to deep into the agency cost theory.

• Chapter 3 suggests and provides evidence of an under-explored “import” channel for the resource curse. It analyzes the impact of commodity exports on import concentration. The richness of an unique database (firm level panel customs data for around 50 countries, including Colombia) allows to calculate import concentration measures at the product-year-country level. The findings suggest that monopolization of imports could be a novel channel for the resource curse.