This paper examines the role of international trade in the reallocation of U.S. manufacturing activity within and across industries from 1977 to 1997. It introduces a new measure of industry exposure to international trade, motivated by the Heckscher-Ohlin model, which focuses on where imports originate rather than their overall level. Results demonstrate that plant survival as well as output a...

All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including O notice, is given to the source. There are two principal theories of why countries trade: comparative advantage and increasing returns to scale. Yet there is no empirical work that assesses the relative importance of these two theories in acc...

This paper is a response to Røpke’s (1994) question whether environmental taxes increase or decrease the volume of international trade. Using a three-country Heckscher–Ohlin–Samuelson model, it is shown that the effect can be in either direction. In the absence of pollution haven and three-country effects that reverse natural comparative advantage, environmental taxes decrease (increase) the vo...

Since changes in trade openness are typically confounded with other factors, it has been difficult to identify the labor market consequences of increased international trade. The advent of the United States Interstate Highway System provides a unique policy experiment, which I use to identify the effect of reducing trade barriers on the relative demand for skilled labor. The Interstate Highway ...

A core prediction of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory is that countries specialize in goods in which they have a comparative advantage, and that the source of comparative advantage is differences in relative factor supplies. To examine this theory, we use the most extensive dataset available and document the pattern of industrial specialization and factor endowment differences in a broad sample of ri...