ANCA D. CRISTEA Department of Economics Mobile: (+1) 765-714-3213 Office: (+1) 765-496-2735 403 W State Street, KRAN 487 Fax: (+1) 765-494-9658 West Lafayette, IN 47906, U.S.A. E-mail: acristea@purdue.edu Citizenship: Romanian (F-1 Visa) Web: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~acristea/ EDUCATION Ph.D. Economics, IN (expected) May 2010 M.A. Economics Clemson University, SC 2005 B.A. Economics and Business Babeṣ-Bolyai University, Romania 2003 Ph.D. Dissertation: Information Transfers in International Trade Committee: David Hummels (chair), Chong Xiang, John Barron, Mohitosh Kejriwal FIELDS OF CONCENTRATION International Economics, Industrial Organization, Applied Econometrics RESEARCH EXPERIENCE Research Assistant to Professors: David Hummels, IN Spring 2007, 2008; Fall 2007 Chong Xiang, IN Spring 2007 Gabrielle Camera, IN Spring 2006 Michael Maloney Clemson University, SC 2004-2005 TEACHING EXPERIENCE Course Instructor Microeconomics (270 students) Fall 2009 Microeconomics (55 students) Summer 2008 Recitation Instructor Principles of Economics Fall 2005 Teaching Assistant International Trade, Professor: David Hummels Fall 2007 (undergraduate) International Trade, Professor: Chong Xiang Spring 2007 Teaching Assistant International Trade (PhD) Fall 2008 (graduate) International Economics (MBA) Summer 2007 Microeconomic Theory I (PhD) Fall 2006 Mathematical Analysis for Economists (PhD) Fall 2006 AWARDS, HONORS AND GRANTS Research Awards Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship, 2008-2009 Robert W. Johnson Award for Distinguished Research Proposal, Spring 2008 Teaching Awards Award for Outstanding Teaching Summer 2008 Center for Instructional Excellence Graduate Teacher Certificate Spring 2009 S e p t 0 9 A n c a D. C r i s t e a 1
Academic Honors H. Macaulay Award for Outstanding Graduate Work in Economics Spring 2005 Clemson University (Awarded to the top 1 st year graduate student) Romanian Government Scholarship, Babeṣ-Bolyai University, Romania 1998-2001 (Merit-based scholarship) Academic Grants CIBER Travel Grant, Summer 2009 Purdue Graduate Student Government Travel Grant, Spring 2009 Travel Grant, Spring 2009 WORKING PAPERS Information Inputs and International Trade: Evidence from U.S. State Level Data on Business Air Travel (Job Market Paper) Revised and resubmitted to the Journal of International Economics CIBER Working Paper (forthcoming) Estimating the Gains from Liberalizing Services Trade: The Case of Air Passenger Transport (with D. Hummels) How Further Trade Liberalization would Change Greenhouse Gas Emissions from International Freight Transport (with D. Hummels, M. Avetisyan and L. Puzzello) CONFERENCES AND SEMINARS Presenter Information Inputs and International Trade: Evidence from U.S. State Level Data on Business Air Travel Southern Economic Association Meeting, San Antonio, TX November, 2009 Asia Pacific Economic Association Meeting, Santa Cruz, CA June, 2009 Midwest International Trade Meeting, Iowa City, IA May, 2009 Microeconomics Workshop, April,October, 2008 Discussant Asia Pacific Economic Association Meeting, Santa Cruz, CA June, 2009 Paper: Nontradable Goods, Prices and the Gravity Model of Trade by J. Moenius, V. Trindade and W. Wu Southern Economic Association Meeting, San Antonio, TX November, 2009 Session: Information and Innovation in International Trade PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS American Economic Association S e p t 0 9 A n c a D. C r i s t e a 2
VOLUNTEER SERVICE Member of Krannert Doctoral Student Association 2005-2010 Member of AIESEC Cluj-Napoca, Romania 1998-2000 (International Association of Students in Economics and Management) Vice-president of AIESEC Cluj-Napoca, Romania 2000-2001 OTHER Computer Skills: Stata, Ox, Matlab, MS Office Languages: English (fluent), Romanian (native), French (intermediate), Italian (basic) REFERENCES David Hummels (Dissertation Chair) Chong Xiang Professor of Economics Associate Professor of Economics West Lafayette, IN 47907-2056 West Lafayette, IN 47907-2056 Phone: (765) 494-4495 Phone: 765-494-4499 E-mail: hummelsd@purdue.edu E-mail: cxiang@purdue.edu John M. Barron Kelly Blanchard Loeb Professor of Economics Continuous Term Lecturer Economics Department Head Director of Doctoral Programs and Research West Lafayette, IN 47907-2056 Phone: (765) 494-7956 West Lafayette, IN 47907-2056 E-mail: khb@purdue.edu Phone: (765) 494-4451 E-mail: barron@purdue.edu S e p t 0 9 A n c a D. C r i s t e a 3
ANCA D. CRISTEA Research Statement My primary area of research is International Trade with a particular emphasis on topics related to trade costs and services trade. My dissertation work provides theory and evidence examining the importance of information transfers in international trade, and analyzes the effectiveness of policy measures designed to improve connectivity across export markets. The empirical evidence relies on a novel U.S. dataset on international air travel flows, which is employed as a direct measure of information linkages across countries. There is growing interest among international economists in the link between trade and the transmission of complex information. As traded goods become more differentiated and production networks spread across the globe, information transfers across countries should have a direct impact on the size, location, and patterns of international trade. Several distinct literatures (e.g., heterogeneous firms models with market access costs, new theories of outsourcing and contract incompleteness, the informative advertising literature) emphasize a direct connection between costly information transfers and international trade. However, empirical evidence to support this insight is scarce. Information is not always observable, and often available flows (e.g., telephone calls, internet usage) do not distinguish between its uses for production or personal consumption purposes. Both measurement problems are overcome when information is transmitted in person across national borders, because in this case communication flows leave a paper trail in the form of business-class airline tickets. In my job market paper (now revised and resubmitted to the Journal of International Economics) I examine the importance of information as an input to international trade by formalizing an exporter s decision to acquire information about foreign markets in order to increase sales. In my model, information enters as an endogenous fixed cost of trade that is chosen by heterogeneous firms and employed as a productive input into market-specific product appeal. Differences in goods information intensities, bilateral communication costs and foreign market potentials determine the optimal level of information transmitted within a trade relationship. I empirically confirm the theoretical predictions by estimating the responsiveness of bilateral air travel demands to variations in the volume and composition of U.S. manufacturing exports. A key contribution is the empirical strategy used for identification. To remove any spurious correlation induced by cross-country differences driving both air travel and trade flows, I rely on the intra-national dimension of the data and exploit only the U.S. state destination country time variation in both exports and international business-class air traffic. If information transfers are an input to trade, then one should observe a match between the degree of export complexity and the quantity of business travel demanded. Conditional on air travel costs, I find that an increase in the export volumes significantly raises the demand for business air travel. This effect is magnified by the share of differentiated goods in the composition of trade. From industry level analysis, I find that the estimated information intensities of trade are correlated with industry R&D shares and with measured contract intensities. This confirms the insight that exports of innovation-rich manufactures and goods facing contractual frictions are most dependent on personal meetings. S e p t 0 9 A n c a D. C r i s t e a 4
The strong relation between travel and trade flows suggests an important policy question. Services trade is rapidly growing both in economic importance and as a focus of the international liberalization agenda. However relatively little is known about past services liberalization due to measurement issues related to the intangible nature of most services, and the difficulty in identifying specific liberalization experiments. In contrast, episodes of air transport liberalization via Open Skies Agreements, in combination with my detailed data on international air travel, provide a good opportunity to add new insights to this literature. Using a micro model of firm competition that accounts for the particular hub-and-spoke network structure of the aviation industry, I examine three distinct channels through which service liberalization affects trade in air transport services: market competition, economies of density, and service quality. Estimating a system of demand and supply equations, I provide evidence that Open Skies Agreements significantly improve the provision of international air travel services, lowering airfares and increasing quality. These benefits are directly reflected in the rapid growth of international air travel. Further, air travel is not only a service consumers directly demand; it is an input into trade relationships. This implies a strong complementarity between liberalization in services and trade in goods. A third and related paper examines the change in greenhouse gas emissions associated with a liberalization of world trade, focusing primarily on the international transport channel. The use of airplanes produces nearly 50 times more CO2 than boats for each ton-km of cargo moved. While trade liberalization increases the demand for freight transportation services, we argue that the quantitative implications for pollution emissions depend on which products and country pairs see more trade growth and how much of their shipments require fuel-intensive transportation modes. The results indicate that trade liberalization will sharply increase total CO2 emissions from international transport primarily because liberalization will shift a growing fraction of trade onto airplanes. My future research plans include a broader investigation of market interconnectivity in determining international trade patterns. One research project that is closely linked to my current work is to explore the timing of information and trade flows by accounting for a dynamic relation between information transfers and international transactions. Other future projects involve collaborative work addressing information spillovers and exporter agglomerations, the impact of communication technologies for international trade and the extent of their substitutability to the more traditional in-person meetings. S e p t 0 9 A n c a D. C r i s t e a 5