We exploit Japan’s 19th century move from autarky to free trade to provide the first test of the general validity of … a single refutable prediction on the economy’s factor content of trade. Our test combines factor price data from Japan …’s late autarky period with Japan’s factor content of trade calculated with the technologies of the country of origin of …

We propose a normative assessment of the value of international trade that is rooted in production theory and embeds … Ricardo’s 1817 formulation of the gains from trade into a multi-factor general equilibrium framework. Without imposing strong … the magnitude and the sources of the gains from trade. A high quality data set on product and task-specific factor …

enhance convergence of the growth rates of trading economies. In contrast, reductions in transportation costs of non …

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past and present? We derive a micro-founded measure of trade … frictions from leading trade theories and use it to gauge the importance of bilateral trade costs in determining international … trade flows. We construct a new balanced sample of bilateral trade flows for 130 country pairs across the Americas, Asia …

Quantitative results from a large class of international trade models depend critically on the elasticity of trade with … respect to trade frictions. We develop a simulated method of moments estimator to estimate this elasticity from disaggregate … price and trade-flow data using the Ricardian model. We motivate our estimator by proving that the estimator developed in …

We propose a quantitative framework for the analysis of industrialization in which specialization in manufacturing or … agriculture is driven by comparative advantage and non-homothetic preferences. Countries are integrated through trade but trade is … better fit to cross-sectional data on manufacturing shares than frameworks which ignore the role of trade costs or non …

benefits of trade. We assert that this emphasize leads to erroneous student mindset that trade requires specialization based on … trade situation for which specialization is not relevant. …Introductory economics courses emphasize opportunity cost, comparative advantage and specialization to show the …

Does trade openness cause higher GDP per capita? Since the seminal instrumental variables (IV) estimates of Frankel and … natural disasters affect bilateral trade, and that this effect is conditioned by geographical variables such as distance to …

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear … that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we … trade and low market potential (income per capita). We tentatively conclude that cities are important drivers of FDI and …