Outsourcing has become an increasingly contentious subject ever since N. Gregory Mankiw remarked in 2004 that outsourcing is just another way of doing international trade, and must be beneficial to the nation, including the workers. We construct a simple two-sector specific-factor model and...

The paper explains most, if not all, observations made by the empirical literature regarding the behavior of skilled and unskilled real wages in the United States, especially those since 1980. Generalizing the Stopler-Samuelson theorem, the authors show that the nontraded sector is critical to...

Most economists consider the debate on free trade closed for all practical purposes. DLUHOSCH, FREYTAG and KRUEGER [1998] criticize an earlier paper by BATRA and BELADI [1996] and argue that freer trade has contributed to a rise in US growth of investment and social welfare. Using raw figures,...

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate the currently mushrooming phenomenon of outsourcing into the standard two-sector, two-factor Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade. We first show how outsourcing modifies a firm's production function, and then demonstrate that outsourcing...