Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Publication
    Solving Leontief's Paradox with Endogenous Growth Theory
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2018-11-29) ; ;
    Theories of international trade have severe difficulties in explaining why, despite i) substantial differences in factor-proportions across industries and ii) considerable cross-country differences in capital-labor ratios, the iii) the evidence for factor-proportions trade is rather weak. We propose a simple explanation of this well known finding: standard trade theories treat important forces such as the distribution of productivity within the economy as exogenous. We argue instead that the productivity allocation is endogenous and counter-balances factor-proportion differentials be- tween countries. Consequently, comparative advantage across countries of different development levels is negligible and this is why the incentives for trade are low.
      226
  • Publication
    Automation, New Technology and Non-Homothetic Preferences
    (University College Dublin School of Economics, 2019-05) ;
    To rationalize a substantial income share of labor despite progressive task automation over the centuries, we present a simple model in which demand moves along a vertically differentiated production structure toward goods of increasing sophistication. Automation of more sophisticated goods requires capital of increasing quality. Quality capital remains scarce along the growth path. This is why labor keeps up a substantial fraction of income. Real capital, however, that is capital measured in units of the quality of some base year, becomes abundant relative to labor. While our model features an entirely different mechanism, we show that its aggregate representation is the one of a neoclassical growth model with labor-augmenting technical change.
      465
  • Publication
    Competing Gains From Trade
    (University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2019-03) ;
    Differences in growth rates across countries imply a strong relation between factor proportions based trade and key aggregate economic outcomes. We construct two macro-trade datasets and illustrate that this relation is rather weak in the data. We propose a simple explanation: in the presence of intra- industry trade, pronounced trade specialization patterns culminate in a loss of varieties. In a dynamic two-country model, we illustrate that the introduction of intra-industry trade overwhelmingly subdues the inter-industry trade dynamics and realigns the behavior of standard models with the empirical evidence along various dimensions. We also provide empirical support for our mechanism: labor and capital intensive goods are traded between developed and developing countries in both directions and in similar proportions in overall trade.
      168