Abstract

This paper presents a structural ranking of countries by their distance to frontier. The ranking is based on comparative advantage. Hence, it reveals information on the productive capabilities of countries that is fundamentally different from GDP per capita. It can be micro-founded using standard trade models. The estimation strategy provides a general, non-parametric approach to uncovering a log-supermodular structure from the data, and I use it to also derive a structural ranking of products by their complexity. The underlying theory provides a fexible micro-foundation for the Economic Complexity Index (Hidalgo and Hausmann, 2009). 

Abstract

We introduce incumbency effects into a tractable dynamic model of international trade. The framework nests the canonical Melitz (2003)-Chaney (2008) model as a special case. The key novelty is that fixed costs of market access decrease with tenure. As a consequence, there is less market exit and entry in response to a shock. We derive a gravity equation and show that, ceteris paribus, countries that liberalized their trade relationship earlier trade more today. We provide supporting evidence for the underlying mechanism and derive an augmented ACR formula (Arkolakis et al., 2012) for the gains from trade that accounts for incumbency effects. A quantitative analysis suggests that our mechanism can explain up to 25% of countries’ home shares and that the gains from trade are, on average, 10% larger when accounting for incumbency effects. The analysis further reveals novel distributional effects of trade that benefit real wages but reduce profits.  

Abstract

We examine how inequality and openness interact in shaping the long-run growth prospects of developing countries. To this end, we develop a Schumpeterian growth model with heterogeneous households and non-homothetic preferences for quality. We show that inequality affects growth very differently in an open economy as opposed to a closed economy: If the economy is close to the technological frontier, the positive demand effect of inequality on growth found in closed-economymodels may be amplied by international competition. In countries with a larger distance to the technology frontier, however, rich households satisfy their demand for high quality via importing, and the effect of inequality on growth is smaller than in a closed economy and may even be negative. We show that this latter theoretical prediction is in line with basic patterns in the data, both when considering industry-level growth in export quality and when considering growth in GDP per capita.

Abstract

We revisit the well-known fact that richer countries tend to produce a larger variety of goods and analyze economic development through (export) diversification. We show that countries are more likely to enter `nearby' industries, i.e., industries that require fewer new occupations. To rationalize this finding, we develop a small open economy (SOE) model of economic development at the extensive industry margin. In our model, industries differ in their input requirements of non-tradeable occupations or tasks. The SOE grows if profit maximizing firms decide to enter new, more advanced industries, which requires training workers in all occupations that are new to the economy. As a consequence, the SOE is more likely to enter nearby industries in line with our motivating fact. We provide indirect evidence in support of our main mechanism and then discuss implications: We show that there may be multiple equilibria along the development path, with some equilibria leading on a pathway to prosperity while others resulting in an income trap, and discuss implications for industrial policy. We finally show that the rise of China has a non-monotonic effect on the growth prospects of other developing countries, and provide suggestive evidence for this theoretical prediction. 

Abstract

We analyze how (amplified) superstar effects impact the allocation of talent across competing teams in large matching markets.  We show that a convex transformation of payoffs promotes positive assortative matching. This is a general result that holds under minimal assumptions on how skills translate into competition outcomes and how competition outcomes translate into payoffs. Our reduced-form analysis covers a wide range of special cases from the literature that micro-found convex transformations of payoffs through diverse mechanisms including globalization, technological change, urban agglomeration, and inter-occupational spillovers.

Abstract

We introduce quality differentiation into a Ricardian model of international trade. We show that (1) quality differentiation allows industrialized countries to be active across the full board of products, complex and simple ones, while developing countries systematically specialize in simple products, in line with novel stylized facts. (2) Quality differentiation may thus help to explain why richer countries tend to be more diversified and why, increasingly over time, rich and poor countries tend to export the same products. (3) Quality differentiation implies that the gains from inter-product trade mostly accrue to developing countries. (4) Guided by our theory, we use a censored regression model to estimate the link between a country's GDP per capita and its export quality. We find a much stronger relationship than when using OLS, in line with our theory.