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...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, which emphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources across firms. We discuss the empirical challenges that motivated this research and its relationship to traditional...

This paper treats taxation in kind (IKT) as an example of price regulation, emphasizing IKT-avoidance behavior, and its interactions with the other costs of price controls. This emphasis fundamentally changes efficiency conclusions, and adds new ones. IKTs do not in fact randomly sample...

We develop a trade model in which productivity presents an arbitrary pattern of correlation. The model approximates the full class of factor demand systems consistent with Ricardian theory. In particular, our framework formalizes Ricardo's insight that countries gain more from trade with...

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...

This paper characterizes the dynamic empirical properties of country export capabilities in order to inform modelling of the long-run behavior of comparative advantage. The starting point for our analysis is two strong empirical regularities in international trade that have previously been...

This paper investigates an empirical puzzle in technology adoption for developing countries: the low adoption rates of technologies like hybrid maize that increase average farm profits dramatically. I offer a simple explanation for this: benefits and costs of technologies are heterogeneous, so...

International trade has experienced a Ricardian revival. In this article, we offer a user guide to assignment models, which we will refer to as Ricardo-Roy (R-R) models, that have contributed to this revival

We reconcile international trade theory with findings of enormous plant-level heterogeneity in exporting and productivity. Our model extends basic Ricardian theory to accommodate many countries, geographic barriers, and imperfect competition. Fitting the model to bilateral trade among the United...

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...