A number of studies have tried to gauge the effect of international trade on the rising U.S. skill premium by examining whether product prices in unskill-intensive sectors have fallen relative to prices in skill-intensive sectors. However, these studies do not estimate what share of domestic...

Firms that export or, even more so, are part of a multinational enterprise tend to exhibit higher productivity than their purely domestic counterparts. To better understand this correlation, we incorporate the perspective of industrial organization that one of the main drivers of differences in...

Are there productivity spillovers from FDI to domestic firms, and, if so, how much should host countries be willing to pay to attract FDI? To examine these questions we use a plant-level panel covering U.K. manufacturing from 1973 through 1992. Across a wide range of specifications, we estimate...

This paper examines whether the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (sbtc) explains changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. First, using a two-factor, two-sector, two-country model we demonstrate that in many cases it is the sector bias of sbtc that determines sbtc's...

In recent years many economists have analyzed whether international trade has contributed to rising U.S. wage inequality by changing relative product prices. In this paper I survey the findings of nine product-price' studies which together demonstrate how the methodology of product-price studies...

In this paper I analyze whether international trade contributes to per capita income convergence across countries. The analysis focuses on four important post-1945 multilateral trade liberalizations. To identify trade's effect on income dispersion, in each case I use a difference-in-differences'...

In this paper I try to determine whether international trade has been increasing the own-price elasticity of demand for U.S. labor in recent years. The empirial work yields three main results. First, from 1960 through 1990 demand for U.S. production labor became more elastic in manufacturing...

The recent literature on cross-country convergence of per capita income has largely ignored international trade. The reason might be perspective. Most convergence papers frame the analysis in a `Solow world' in which countries exist independent of one another. But most international trade...

In antebellum America an extensive network of canals and railroads was constructed which slashed transportation costs across regions. This 'transportation revolution' presents an interesting case study of the factor-price convergence (FPC) theorem. In this paper I look for integration of...

Many economists studying America's wage divergence in the 1980's have concluded that its primary cause was a within-industry shift in relative labor demand toward the more-skilled. Following the modeling framework and empirical methods developed in Slaughter (1993), in this paper I try to...