This paper develops a theory of the endogenous formation of a common market in a three-country, two-factor political economy model. In the status quo, Home and Foreign implement non-discriminatory policies towards international factor flows as to maximize the domestic median voter's welfare....

The classical Heckscher-Ohlin-Mundell paradigm states that trade and capital mobility are substitutes, in the sense that trade integration reduces the incentives for capital to flow to capital-scarce countries. In this paper we show that in a world with heterogeneous financial development, the...

The factor proportions model, also known as the Heckscher-Ohlin model, is the main neoclassical model of international trade theory. It was developed by Swedish economists Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin in 1920s and 1930s. According to the factor proportions model a country should specialize in...

This paper summarises the key findings of a recent study on the impact of Eastern Enlargement of the European Union (EU) on labour markets in the current Member States. The study focuses on three main channels, along which enlargement may affect labour markets in the EU, namely i) trade, ii)...

This paper studies the great collapse in value added trade using a structural decomposition analysis. We show that changes in vertical specialisation accounted for almost half of the great trade collapse, while the previous literature on gross trade has mainly focused on final expenditure,...

Rethinking the foundations of Heckscher-Ohlin theory when countries have different technologies, this paper shows how to make the proper adjustments for international productivity differences. The central tool is a factor conversion matrix that computes the local factor content of foreign...

The core subjects of trade theory are the pattern and volume of trade: which goods are traded by which countries, and how much of those goods are traded. The first part of this paper discusses evidence on comparative advantage, with an emphasis on carefully connecting theoretical models with...

This paper constructs a theoretical model to illustrate the inherent dynamics between the trade imbalance and the comparative advantage of factor endowment structure under a two-country setting (South vs North). Our model shows that the shift of comparative advantage of factor endowment...

We show that in the case of multiple goods and factors, the factor proportions theory has the following prediction: across industries, the impacts of the endowment of a given factor on industry outputs have positive co-variance with the relative uses of this factor. The intuition is that on...