Development Accounting in a Heckscher-Ohlin World

This paper tries to contribute to the strand of literature that investigates the question to what extend differences in per capita income between countries are due to differences in factor endowments like human- and physical capital on the one hand and due to differences in technology on the other hand. In particular, I am trying to assess to what extend structural transformation, ie the ability of a country to specialize in the production of goods that intensively use the factors with which it is abundantly endowed, has an important role in determining cross country income differences. I find that when productivities are country specific, for realistic parameter values structural transformation plays little role and productivity differences between countries remain large. However, when I allow for factor augmenting technology differences and factors are complementary in sectoral production, there seem to be large differences in the productivity of physical capital that are strongly correlated with per capita income, while human capital seems to have an inverse hump shape. This result is ad odds with Caselli (2005), who finds that poor countries use capital more efficiently than rich countries, while having a lower productivity of human capital. Finally, I use trade data and the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek equations to assess the plausibility of my calibrations and find a good fit for the model with factor specific productivities and complementary factors.

Trade and Sectoral Productivity

Even though differences in sectoral total factor productivity are at the heart of Ricardian trade theory and many models of growth and development, very little is known about their size and their form. In this paper we try to fill this gap by using a Hybrid-Ricardo-Heckscher-Ohlin trade model and bilateral sectoral trade data to overcome the data problem that has limited previous studies, which have used input and output data to back out productivities, to a small number of OECD economies. We provide a comparable set of sectoral productivities for 24 manufacturing sectors and more than sixty countries at all stages of development. Our results show that TFP differences in manufacturing sectors between rich and poor countries are substantial and far more pronounced in skill and R\&D intensive sectors. We also apply our productivity estimates to test theories on development that have implications for the patterns of sectoral productivities across countries.Sectoral Productivity Differences, Trade and Production Data, Ricardo, Heckscher-Ohlin, Comparative Advantage

Skill-biased technological change, unemployment and brain drain

We develop a general equilibrium model of technological change and migration to examine the effects of a change in skill endowments on wages, employment rates and emigration rates of skilled and unskilled workers. We find that, depending on the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled workers, an increase in the skill ratio can increase the expected wage of the skilled and decrease the brain drain. We provide empirical estimates and simulations to support our findings and show that effects are empirically relevant and potentially sizeable. Our findings fit the stylized facts on educational upgrading in developing countries during the 1980s and the subsequent decrease in the brain drain from those countries during the 1990s.Technological Change, Skill Premia, Unemployment, Brain Drain.

Trade Policy: Home Market Effect vs Terms of Trade Externality

We study trade policy in a two-sector Krugman type model of trade. We conduct a general analysis allowing for three different instruments: tariffs, export taxes and production subsidies. For each instrument we consider unilateral trade policy without retaliation. When carefully disentangling the different effects that determine policy makers' choices and modeling general equilibrium effects of taxes/tariffs, we find that production subsidies are always inefficiently low and driven by terms of trade effects. In the cases of tariffs and export taxes the home market effect prevails for some parameter combinations but mostly trade policy is determined by terms of trade effects and the desire to reduce distortions arising from monopolistic competition. Hence, our analysis sheds new light on trade policy in a model of intra-industry trade.Home Market Effect, Terms of Trade, Tariffs and Subsidies

The Micro Dynamic of Exporting-Evidence from French Firms

This paper describes the dynamics of rms' exports to dierent countries. Using a panel of almost 19,000 French exporters, we dene an export-relation as an observed positive export ow from a French rm to a destination. We establish the following facts: 1. There is a great deal of dynamics in rms' export relations that washes out at a more aggregate level; 2. Export values shipped by individual rms to specic destinations are very volatile: most of the changes occur within established export relations (intensive margin), with new relations or relations that are terminated (extensive margin)contributing little to adjustments in export value at rm level ; 3. Export ows within a newly-created relation involve very small values, often inferior to 1000 euros; 4. Export-relations are also very volatile. Moreover, from year to year single rms create and destroy relations simultaneously, and countries are simultaneously involved in the formation and termination of relations; 5. Formation or termination of export relations and changes in export values are explained mostly by rm-country specic shocks; 6. The share of relations continued from one year to the next is correlated with country characteristics: it is higher in bigger and closer markets. We discuss how those ndings could be related to dierent kinds of heterogeneous rm models and to a relation-specic trade model, arguing that the second one seems to t more naturally all the documented facts.

Productivity Differences in an Interdependent World

This paper studies cross country differences in productivity from an open economy perspective by using a Helpman-Krugman-Heckscher-Ohlin model. This allows to combine tools from development accounting and the trade literature. When simultaneously fitting data on income, factor prices and the factor content of trade, I find that rich countries have far higher productivities of human capital than poor ones, while differences in physical capital productivity are not systematically related to income per worker. I estimate an aggregate elasticity of substitution between human and physical capital that is significantly below one, clearly rejecting a world that consists of a collection of Cobb-Douglas economies and also one where Heckscher-Ohlin trade is important

Income differences and input-output structure

We consider a multi-sector general equilibrium model with IO linkages, sector-specific productivities and tax rates. Using tools from network theory, we investigate how the IO structure interacts with productivities and taxes in the determination of aggregate income. We show that aggregate income is a simple function of the first and second moments of the distribution of the IO multipliers, sectoral productivities and sectoral tax rates. We then estimate the parameters of the model to fit their joint empirical distribution. Poor countries have more extreme distributions of IO multipliers than rich economies: there are a few high-multiplier sectors, while most sectors have very low multipliers; by contrast, rich countries have more sectors with intermediate multipliers. Moreover, the correlations of these with productivities and tax rates are positive in poor countries, while being negative in rich ones. The estimated model predicts cross-country income differences extremely well, also out-of-sample. Finally, we perform a number of counterfactuals and compute optimal tax rates

Productivity Differences in an Interdependent World

This paper studies cross country differences in productivity from an open economy perspective by using a Helpman-Krugman-Heckscher-Ohlin model. This allows to combine tools from development accounting and the trade literature. When simultaneously fitting data on income, factor prices and the factor content of trade, I find that rich countries have far higher productivities of human capital than poor ones, while differences in physical capital productivity are not systematically related to income per worker. I estimate an aggregate elasticity of substitution between human and physical capital that is significantly below one, clearly rejecting a world that consists of a collection of Cobb-Douglas economies and also one where Heckscher-Ohlin trade is important

The real exchange rate, innovation and productivity

We evaluate manufacturing firms' responses to changes in the real exchange rate (RER) using detailed firm-level data for a large set of countries for the period 2001-2010. We uncover the following stylized facts: In emerging Asia, real depreciations are associated with faster growth of firm-level TFP, sales and cashow, higher probabilities to engage in R&D and export. We find no significant effects for firms from industrialized economies and negative effects for firms in other emerging economies, which are less export-intensive and more import-intensive. Motivated by these facts, we build a dynamic model in which real depreciations raise the cost of importing intermediates, but increase demand and the profitability to engage in exports and R&D, thereby relaxing borrowing constraints and enabling more firms to overcome the fixed-cost hurdle for financing R&D. We decompose the effects of RER changes on productivity growth into these channels and explain regional heterogeneity in the effects of RER changes in terms of differences in export intensity, import intensity and financial constraints. We estimate the model and quantitatively evaluate the different mechanisms by providing counterfactual simulations of temporary real exchange rate movements. Effects on physical TFP growth, while different across regions, are non-linear and asymmetric