This paper examines the effects of "fragmentation,"defined as the splitting of a production process into two or more steps that can be undertaken in different locations but that lead to the same final product. Introducing the possibility of fragmentation into simple theoretical models of...

This paper addresses an issue that has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both from international trade economists and from labor economists: What has caused the relative wage of skilled labor compared to unskilled labor in the United States to increase through the 1980s and 1990s?

This paper examines the effects of fragmentation across cones of diversification in the Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade. Fragmentation is defined as the splitting of production processes into parts that can be done in different countries. Such fragmentation may occur in a world of...

This paper is the text of a lecture given on November 20, 1997 to inaugurate the John W. Sweetland Chair in International Economics, in the Department of Economics of the University of Michigan. Its message is that international trade theory, and in particular the theory of comparative...