Theories of international trade assume that all countries use similar and exogenous technologies in the production of any good. This paper relaxes this assumption. The marriage of literatures on biased technical change and trade yields a tractable theory, which predicts that differences in...

focuses on two objectives in his study: (1) to establish a baseline measurement of the level and geographic distribution of social capital in Argentina, and (2) to identify its empirical determinants. The study's survey questionnaire provides individual-level data on the population's...

This paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro-level labor-market outcomes, including the unemployment rate, the average wage index, and overall and female employment levels and labor force participation rates. Together these outcome variables capture the...

Calculations of marginal welfare effects suggest that agricultural development has had important positive effects on national welfare, especially in developing countries. Latin American and Caribbean countries have also benefited from agricultural growth, but non-agricultural production has had...

Lederman and Maloney trace the evolution of research and development (R&D) expenditures along the development process using a new global panel data set. They show that R&D effort measured as a share of GDP rises with development at an increasing rate. The authors examine how four groups of...

The United States imports around 25 percent of its merchandise under some form of preferential trade regime. The authors examine both the origins and consequences of U.S. trade preferences in the context of the gravity model of international trade. First, they provide estimates of the impact of...

Lederman and Maloney examine the empirical relationships between trade structure and economic growth, particularly the influence of natural resource abundance, export concentration, and intra-industry trade. They test the robustness of these relationships across proxies, control variables, and...

The authors rely on a series of growth accounting exercises to determine whether the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP) or the unexplained portion of GDP growth (after controlling for the accumulation of capital per worker) in 18 Latin American and Caribbean economies has benefited...

The authors use disaggregated export data to explore the relationship between economic discovery and economic development. They find that discoveries, or episodes, when countries begin exporting a new product are not limited to so-called"dynamic"industries. Rather, they also occur in traditional...

One side-effect of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09 was the resurgence of a debate over exchange rates. The conventional wisdom dictates that real-exchange rate adjustments are needed in order to bring about changes in trade balances across countries. However, the literature on the effect...