We map United States comparative advantage between 1980 and 1995, by trading partner and region, using Balassa's export-based index of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA). We find: temporally stable and ubiquitous US comparative advantage in differentiated producer goods (except disadvantage in...

The Ricardian model predicts that countries should produce and export relatively more in industries in which they are relatively more productive. Though one of the most celebrated insights in the theory of international trade, this prediction has received virtually no attention in the empirical...

Though one of the pillars of the theory of international trade, the extreme predictions of the Ricardian model have made it unsuitable for empirical purposes. A seminal contribution of Eaton and Kortum (2002) is to demonstrate that random productivity shocks are sufficient to make the Ricardian...

The increasing returns revolution in trade is incomplete in an important respect there exists no compelling empirical demonstration of the role of increasing returns in determining production and trade structure. One reason is that trade patterns of the canonical increasing returns models are a...

This paper investigates the sources of terms of trade volatility, specifically addressing the relative importance of goods-price effects vs. country-price effects. For fuel exporters, most of the terms of trade variation stems from goods-price effects, as one would have expected, a priori. For...

This paper focuses on economists' understanding of the basic determinants of trade patterns and, in particular, on the manner in which these underlying factors change over time and are affected by various policies. A brief survey contrasts the determinants of the structure of trade emphasized by...