We analyze the empirical violation of the Hillman condition, a necessary and sufficient condition for the correspondence between comparative advantage and pre-trade relative prices. Our comprehensive data set allows us to investigate the Hillman condition for virtually all countries of the...

In an economy with imperfect labor contracts, differences in the distribution of talent can be an independent source of comparative advantage. I study a world economy with two activities, one in which an individual's contribution to production can be measured accurately and another in which...

Migration and trade are often linked through ethnic networks boosting bilateral trade. This study uses migration to quantify the importance of Ricardian technology differences for international trade. The framework provides the first panel estimates connecting country-industry productivity and...

Sino-European trade relations have been controversially discussed mainly, if not only, because of the increasing European Union's bilateral trade deficit with China. As from the European perspective trade with China becomes more important, the structural adjustment process of the Chinese economy...

Three features of China's trade patterns suggest that elements beyond factor abundance explain its export performance. The high penetration in world markets of labourintensive products has been accompanied by: (i) a high share in exports of productivityadvanced foreign-owned enterprises (FIEs),...

Three features of China's trade patterns suggest that elements beyond factor abundance explain its export performance. The high penetration in world markets of labourintensive products has been accompanied by: (i) a high share in exports of productivityadvanced foreign-owned enterprises (FIEs),...

We consider the optimal education policies of a small economy whose government has a limited budget. Initially, the economy is closed and the government chooses its education policy to maximize welfare under autarky. Then the economy trades with the rest of the world. Lastly, the government...

We introduce unemployment and endogenous selection of workers into different skill-classes in a trade model with two sectors and heterogeneous firms. This allows us to study the distributional consequences and the skill-specific unemployment effects of trade liberalization. We show that the...