Factor Prices and the Factor Content of Trade Revisited: What's the Use?

This paper examines the usefulness of a result of Deardorff and Staiger (1988), who showed that the factor content of trade can be interpreted under certain assumptions as indicating the nature of the factor price adjustments that can, in a specified sense, be attributed to that trade. This paper elaborates on the sense in which this result says anything about the factor market effects of trade. It also examines several of the assumptions that were used by Deardorff and Staiger to determine whether they can be relaxed.