I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. My research interests focus on the effects of international trade and globalization on workers, consumers, and firms.
Department of Economics
University of Colorado Boulder
256 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0256
sergey dot nigai at colorado dot edu
In "Empirical Productivity Distributions and International Trade" (with Peter Egger and Katharina Erhardt) we use micro and macro data to recover country-sector non-parametric productivity distributions and study the role of comparative advantage in shaping trade when technology takes the form of productivity distributions across firms. The figure on the left illustrates recovered CDF's for 15 countries and 17 sectors.
Expand to read the abstract
This paper reassesses the question of the importance of comparative advantage in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms where productivity is distributed nonparametrically. This assessment rests on a method of isolating empirical productivity distributions for 15 countries and 17 sectors using a combination of firm-level and macroeconomic data together with the structure of the model. In this setting, the effects of technology on trade are substantial and cannot be captured by a small set of technology parameters. On average, comparative advantage accounts for 23% of the observed variation in trade or 70% in the absence of selection effects.