Does trade improve institutions and contribute to long run growth? I develop a theory of trade, in which trade …

One of the most striking features of the world economy is that wealthy countries are clustered together. This paper …

leads to a stable world income distribution. This is because specialization and trade introduce de facto diminishing returns … cross-sectional behavior of the world economy is similar to that of existing exogenous growth models: Cross … exhibit conditional convergence as in the Solow-Ramsey model. The dispersion of the world income distribution is determined by …

-degenerate world income distribution. In accordance with the empirical literature, I find that country characteristics such as the … policies such as subsidies to innovation investments explain a country's position in the eventual world income distribution …

We use firm-level data for 15 countries and 13 manufacturing sectors to estimate firm-level productivity parameters and … to establish representative country-sector-specific empirical productivity distributions. We use these distributions … of technology in shaping international trade flows. We find that, on average, absolute advantage measured as productivity …

higher profits, but forcing less-productive firms to reduce prices and earn lower profits. As a result, low-productivity …

and their productivity. Recent work suggests that these calculations should treat workers of different skill levels as … imperfect substitutes. However, under this approach, it has been challenging to compute skill-specific productivity levels for a … data set on labor force composition to construct measures of productivity for workers in three distinct skill categories …

variables are included as explanatory variables. Estimates found using quantitative theory depend in critical ways on values of …