Date of Award
5-1-2026
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Sylwester, Kevin
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how pandemic-era government containment policies reshaped international trade, and why some trade relationships and product groups proved more resilient than others. Using international panel data and gravity-model frameworks estimated with Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (PPML), the chapters exploit cross-country and within-country variation in COVID-19 policy stringency to identify how policy shocks transmit through demand, supply, and trade composition channels while accounting for unobserved heterogeneity with fixed effects.Chapter 1 quantifies the average effect of COVID-19 stringency measures on bilateral imports during 2020–2022. The results show that tighter importer-side restrictions significantly depress bilateral trade, consistent with destination-country demand and logistics disruptions, while exporter-side stringency exhibits little independent effect in aggregate once country-pair and time effects are controlled for. Chapter 2 demonstrates that these average effects mask substantial heterogeneity across goods. Using over four million bilateral product-level observations, the analysis shows that trade resilience depends on product characteristics. Consumption-oriented goods are more resilient to importer stringency than intermediate goods, consistent with the relative demand inelasticity of necessities. On the supply side, the interaction evidence indicates that the impact of exporter restrictions varies systematically with labor intensity, reflecting the role of essential-sector designations, targeted support, and firms’ ability to adapt production during the pandemic. Chapter 3 shows that pre-pandemic industrial composition also conditions resilience. Bilateral relationships with higher pre-COVID manufacturing shares are significantly less sensitive to exporter stringency shocks, implying that manufacturing-intensive trade linkages—supported by established logistics, essential goods, and production networks—buffer trade from policy disruptions. Taken together, the dissertation provides new evidence that the trade costs of public-health restrictions are highly non-uniform and depend critically on who imposes the policy, what is being traded, and the underlying structure of bilateral trade. These findings inform the design of crisis policies that protect public health while preserving trade resilience
Access
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