Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on...

In a sharp departure from earlier trends, the price of U.S. imports from China rose 6 percent in the 2006-08 period. To explore the forces behind this surprising increase, the authors create a new import index that uses highly disaggregated data to track price developments in different product...

In the field of international trade, data analysis has traditionally had quite modest influence relative to that of pure theory. At one time, this might have been rationalized by the paucity of empirics in the field or its weak theoretical foundations. In recent years empirical research has...

One account of spatial concentration focuses on productivity advantages arising from market size. We investigate this for forty regions of Japan. Our results identify important effects of a region's own size, as well as cost linkages between producers and suppliers of inputs. Productivity links...

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...

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...

In the field of international trade, data analysis has traditionally had quite modest influence relative to that of pure theory. At one time, this might have been rationalized by the paucity of empirics in the field or its weak theoretical foundations. In recent years empirical research has...

This paper develops a simple framework for examining human capital accumulation, unemployment, and relative wages in a global economy. It builds on the models of Davis (1997a, b) of trade between a flexible wage America and a rigid wage Europe. To this it adds a model of human capital...

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....

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...