Exploring Household Consumption, Quantity-Quality Decisions, and Gendered Labour Market Adjustments in Response to Trade Shocks

This dissertation comprises three essays investigating how macroeconomic shocks influence people’s decisions and the factors that explain household consumption and savings behavior in a middle-income country. The first paper assesses the unexplored effects of a significant positive trade-induced price shock on household decisions regarding fertility and education investments and the mechanisms underpinning these effects. The second essay examines how export expansion induced by the U.S-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement impacts female local labor market adjustments and has gender-specific effects. The third essay provides a novel way to understand household consumption behavior based on several different but interrelated consumption hypotheses.