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....

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...

In recent decades, middle-paid jobs have declined, replaced by a mix of high and low-paid jobs. This is labor market polarization. At the same time, initially skilled and typically larger cities have become even more skilled relative to initially less skilled and typically smaller cities. This...

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...

Two facts motivate this study. (1) The United States is the world's most productive economy. (2) The US is the destination for a broad range of net factor inflows: unskilled labor, skilled labor, and capital. Indeed, these two facts may be strongly related: All factors seek to enter the US...

Theories featuring multiple equilibria are now widespread across many fields of economics. Yet little empirical work has asked if such multiple equilibria are salient features of real economies. We examine this in the context of the Allied bombing of Japanese cities and industries in WWII. We...

Does national market size matter for industrial structure? This has been suggested by theoretical work on home market' effects, as in Krugman (1980, 1995). In this paper, I show that what previously was regarded as an assumption of convenience - transport costs only for the differentiated goods...

Empirical work relating trade liberalization and income distributed has iden- tified an important anomaly. The Stolper-Samuelson theorem predict trade liberalization will shift income toward a country's abundant factor. For developing countries, this suggests liberalization will principally...

The increasing returns revolution in trade is incomplete in an important respect there exists no compelling empirical demonstration of the role of increasing returns in determining production and trade structure. One reason is that trade patterns of the canonical increasing returns models are a...

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...