We study the production side of the Heckscher–Ohlin model empirically. The evidence we present suggests that the endowments of countries around the world are too dissimilar for all countries to be able to produce the same set of goods. In contrast, the endowments of the rich OECD countries are sufficiently similar, so that these countries do not have to specialize in different subsets of goods....

Using annual household surveys from 2004 to 2019, we examine the existence of a gender labor income gap among older persons in Peru. Two models are estimated: Model 1 uses basic set demographic, socioeconomic, and personal characteristics as regressors (also called endowments); 2 plus additional characteristics. The Misner‐type relationship holds with positive returns for education experience, ...

Although some point to the large effects of schooling on civic engagement (usually measured in terms of volunteering and participation in civic organizations) and social cohesion (usually measured in terms of social networks and relationship quality), the effects of schooling on social outcomes have not been estimated with the same rigor as the effects of schooling on labor-market outcomes, suc...

Do Downward Private Transfers Enhance Maternal Labor Supply? Evidence from around Europe Drawing on a theoretical model of downward private transfers with endogenous labor supply and recursive econometric models based on 2317 mother-daughter pairs from the 2003 SHARE data on 10 European countries, we investigate the impact of private transfers on the career choices of transfer-receiving young m...

The Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem states that if labor is weakly separable from goods in household utility functions, differential commodity taxation should not be not part of an optimal redistributive tax system. This Theorem, which is arguably the most policy-relevant result to come out of the optimal income tax literature, has come under considerable scrutiny in the literature. We consider how r...

We develop and implement new tests for the completeness of rural labor markets. Our approach builds on the seminal work of Benjamin (1992) and requires panel data with changes in household labor endowments over time. We show how the possibility of asymmetric responses to increases and decreases in labor endowments leads to tests of necessary conditions for a shortage or surplus in the labor mar...

This paper studies optimum income taxation in a small open economy where households differ with respect to their endowments with wealth. The government raises taxes on income from labor and wealth and a source tax on capital used in domestic production. To avoid taxes, households may, at some cost, shift capital to labor income and vice versa. The government can only observe income after shifti...

Regional integration proposals often require agreements between countries that differ in geographic size, resource endowments, transportation assets, technologies, and product quality. In this asymmetric setting, questions arise about the potential for mutual gains and the distribution of benefits among industries and workers in each country. This paper examines how regional integration between...

This paper investigates the sources of cross-sectional di¤erences in consumption, labor supply, wealth and welfare over the lifecycle. I document the existence of rich and informative lifecycle patterns in the joint distribution of wages, hours, consumption and wealth. I then estimate a structural model of precautionary savings with endogenous labor supply and uninsurable wage risk in an attemp...

Does a heterogeneous agents version of a neoclassical model with labor}leisure choice replicate the distributions of consumption and working hours observed in the crosssectional data? Does incorporating heterogeneity enhance the aggregate performance of the representative agent model? We address these questions in a complete market model economy with two sources of heterogeneity: initial endowm...