Stages of Diversification in a Neoclassical World Recent research has documented a U-shaped industrial concentration curve over an economy’s development path. How far can neoclassical trade theory take us in explaining this pattern? We estimate the production side of the Heckscher-Ohlin model using industry data on 44 developed and developing countries for the period 1976-2000. Decomposing the ...

This paper proposes a new empirical framework for analyzing specialization dynamics. A country’s pattern of specialization is viewed as a distribution across sectors, and statistical techniques for analyzing the evolution of this entire distribution are employed. The empirical framework is implemented using data on 20 industries in 7 OECD countries since 1970. We find substantial mobility in pa...

This paper develops a Ricardian model with money to study North-South trade that is mediated by the currency of the North. The model shows that an increase in the supply of Northern money results in inflation being “exported” to the South. The increase in the supply of Northern money also has real effects: (1) it transfers real resources from the South to the North, lowers the wage rate in the ...

Hub-and-Spoke Free Trade Areas* This paper analyzes how the sequential formation of free trade areas affects the volume of trade between member countries. In a three--country, three-good model, if two countries have a free trade area, and both sign a similar agreement with the third, trade between the two decreases, and welfare rises in both. However, if only one of them signs an FTA with the t...

Why is income inequality higher in Latin America than in East Asia? Is this phenomenon related to the region’s natural resource abundance? Is it a contributor to Latin America’s slow and narrowly focused human capital accumulation? If so, can anything be done to reverse the Latin American trends, or should we think of the region’s fate as unalterable? To help answer these questions, this paper ...

Arguably the most important development in recent decades in US factor markets is the decline in the relative wage of the unskilled. By contrast, in Europe it is undoubtedly the rise and persistence of unemployment. Technology has been identified as a key reason for the rising US wage inequality, while labor market rigidities are often cited as a key reason for European unemployment. This paper...

This paper examines the role of external shocks in explaining macroeconomic fluctuations in African countries. We construct a quantitative, stochastic, dynamic, multi-sector equilibrium model of a small open economy calibrated to represent a "typical" African economy. In our framework, external shocks consist of trade shocks, modeled as fluctuations in the prices of exported primary commodities...

Standard tests of the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) hypothesis treat productivity levels in and across countries as fixed and observable, and offer little empirical support for the hypothesis. If productivity follows a jump-diffusion process, these standard tests will generate biased estimates, measuring productivity levels with error. This paper instead proposes an ‘errors in variables’ appro...

This paper uses a gravity model to assess ex-post regional trade agreements. The model includes 130 countries and is estimated with panel data over the period 1962–1996. The introduction of the correct number of dummy variables allows for identification of Vinerian trade creation and trade diversion effects, while the estimation method takes into account the unobservable characteristics of each...

The Sukuk market has become the fastest growing segment of the Islamic financial services industry. Governments and other corporate entities have started tapping the local and international Sukuk markets in order to raise the required funds. The investor base is also expanding and Sukuk has now become a popular and obvious choice for retail investors in a number of jurisdictions. However, becau...