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...

Two facts motivate this study. (1) The United States is the world's most productive economy. (2) The US is the destination for a broad range of net factor inflows: unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital. Indeed, these two facts may be strongly related: All factors seek to enter the US...

Theories featuring multiple equilibria are now widespread across many fields of economics. Yet little empirical work has asked if such multiple equilibria are salient features of real economies. We examine this in the context of the Allied bombing of Japanese cities and industries in WWII. We...

We consider the distribution of economic activity within a country in light of three leading theories - increasing returns, random growth, and locational fundamentals. To do so, we examine the distribution of regional population in Japan from the Stone Age to the modern era. We also consider the...

The dominant paradigm of world trade patterns posits two principal features. Trade between North and South arises due to traditional comparative advantage, largely determined by differences in endowment patterns. Trade within the North, much of it intra-industry trade, is based on economies of...

Study of the factor content of trade has become a laboratory to test our ideas about how the key elements of endowments, production, absorption and trade fit together within a general equilibrium framework. Already a great deal of progress has been made in fitting these pieces together....

There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is 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...

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...

The Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek model of factor service trade is a central construct in international economics. Empirically, though, it is a flop. This warrants a new approach. Using Japanese regional data we are able to test the HOV model by independently examining its component production and...

A half-century of empirical work on the factor proportions theory has identified devise simple amendments that bring theory and data into reasonable congruence. Our study considers standard and novel hypotheses regarding the failures of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek formulation and is the first to...