Dennis Novy, The CAGE Background Briefing Series No. 39, August 2015

The recent global crisis hit output, but the decline in international trade was twice as big. Standard models of trade fail to account for the severity of the event. This column proposes a new model that argues the great trade collapse was due to uncertainty. The uncertainty lead firms to postpone orders. As a result, trade declined substantially more than production. Data from the US for the past 50 years show quantitatively large effects of uncertainty shocks on the trade.

Economic History