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Working Paper
Explaining the volume of intraindustry trade: are increasing returns necessary?
The recent theoretical literature has suggested that increasing returns to scale are necessary to account for the volume of intraindustry trade among developed economies. The present paper shows that such trade can arise quite naturally in a setting with constant returns to scale. ; An example is developed with "perfectly-intraindustry goods," in which countries with identical endowments and arbitrarily small technical differences nonetheless trade substantial amounts of goods of identical factor intensity. This is extended to a case with factor price equalization, fully determinate trade ...
Working Paper
Human capital, unemployment, and relative wages in a global economy
This paper develops a simple framework for examining human capital accumulation, unemployment, and relative wages in a global economy. It builds on the models of Davis (1998a, b) of trade between a flexible-wage America and a rigid-wage Europe. To this it adds a model of human capital accumulation based on Findlay and Kierzkowski (1983). A variety of comparative statics are examined, including changes in educational capital and population, entry of new countries to the trading world, technical change, and a productivity slowdown. We derive the consequences for the skilled-to unskilled wage ...
Journal Article
What's behind volatile import prices from China?
In a sharp departure from earlier trends, the price of U.S. imports from China rose 6 percent in the 2006-08 period. To explore the forces behind this surprising increase, the authors create a new import index that uses highly disaggregated data to track price developments in different product types. The index reveals that the largest price increases were concentrated in industrial supplies - goods that rely heavily on commodity inputs. The authors conclude that the surge in commodity prices through mid-2008 was the primary driver of the rising import prices from China.
Report
The home market, trade, and industrial structure
Does national market size matter for industrial structure? This has been suggested by theoretical work on "home market" effects, as in Krugman (1980, 1995). In this paper, I show that what previously was regarded as an assumption of convenience ? transport costs only for the differentiated goods ? matters a great deal. In a focal case in which differentiated and homogeneous goods have identical transport costs, the home market effect disappears. The paper discusses available evidence on the relative trade costs for differentiated and homogeneous goods. No compelling argument is found that ...
Report
Economic geography and regional production structure: an empirical investigation
There are two principal theories of why countries or regions trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is virtually no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in accounting for production structure and trade. We use a framework that nests an increasing returns model of economic geography featuring "home market effects" with that of Heckscher-Ohlin. We employ these trade models to account for the structure of regional production in Japan. We find support for the existence of economic geography effects in eight of nineteen ...