Recent theoretical models show that international trade can induce within-industry skillupgrading by raising R&D intensity and creating skill-biased technologies. This paper tests this assertion by estimating the effect of rising import shares on wage shares for 4-digit SIC US manufacturing industries. Using Arellano-Bond estimation to account for the endogeneity of imports, I find that neither...

A new literature on firm heterogeneity and firm level globalisation strategies has developed rapidly over the last decade. New insights on why some firms export and others do not, why some firms fail to survive in export markets and why some choose to produce overseas rather than export have been generated. This paper provides a survey and evaluation of this literature. It reviews both new theo...

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 examines the exporting behaviour of Russian manufacturers by considering the interaction of firm characteristics and external conditions. An important distinction is made between general exporting activity and export to developed countries. Firm features and specific export experience are found to be important in determining the international orientation of manufacturers and the dest...

Industrial delicensing, which began in 1985 in India marked a discrete break from a past of centrally planned industrial development. Similar liberalization episodes are taking place across the globe. We develop a simple Schumpeterian growth model to understand how firms respond to the entry threat imposed by liberalization. The model emphasizes that firm responses, even within the same industr...

This study tests the importance of Ricardian technology di¤erences for international trade. Panel regressions …nd technology growth increases manufacturing exports. To establish a causal relationship between technology and trade, instrumental-variables speci…cations exploit uneven technology di¤usion from the US through ethnic scienti…c networks. The instrumented elasticity of export growth to ...

The paper evaluates the effect of the FAMEX export promotion program in Tunisia on the export performance of beneficiary firms using firm-level data. Propensity-score matching difference-indifference and weighted least squares estimates suggest that beneficiaries expand at the intensive and the extensive margin (markets and products). However, this expansion is short-lived for total exports. Ou...

This paper contributes to the flourishing literature on exports and productivity by using a unique newly available panel of exporting establishments from the manufacturing sector of Germany from 1995 to 2004 to test three hypotheses derived from a theoretical model by Hopenhayn (Econometrica 1992): (H1) Firms that stop exporting in year t were in t-1 less productive than firms that continue to ...

This paper estimates the impact of China’s exchange rate changes on exports of competitor countries in third markets, which we call the “spillover effect”. We use recent theory to develop an identification strategy in which competition between China and its developing country competitors in specific products and destinations plays a key role. We exploit the variation—afforded by disaggregated t...

Market distortions can lead to resource misallocation, which can further lead to inefficiency. Throughout the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, qualitative evidence of various sources of distortion abounds. No study, however, has quantified the inefficiency in the slave trade due to these distortions. We use a structural approach to identify the dispersion of distortions in the slave t...