In the trade-technology-wage debate, the effects of the various forms of technical progress on relative factor prices have been addressed in a number of contributions over the past decade. However, the existing literature is far from conclusive. The various contributions have either relied on...

In this paper we develop a monopolistic competition model where firms exercise their market power across multiple products. Even with CES preferences, markups are endogenous. Firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the net profits from a new variety against the costs of...

This paper follows Jones (2005) in his approach to deriving the global production function from microfoundations. His framework is generalized by allowing for dependence between the Pareto distributions of labor- and capital-augmenting developments. Using the Clayton copula family to capture...

We study the relation between workers' skill dispersion and firm productivity using a unique dataset of Italian manufacturing firms from the early eighties to the late nineties with individual records on all their workers. Our measure of skill is the individual worker's effect obtained as a...

In this paper Sato's two-level CES production function has been estimated by nonlinear regression carried out through five different methods of optimization, namely, the Hooke-Jeeves Pattern Moves (HJPM), the Hooke-Jeeves-Quasi-Newton (HJQN), the Rosenbrock-Quasi-Newton (RQN), the Differential...

Normalising CES production functions in the calibration of basic dynamic models allows to choose technology parameters in an economically plausible way. When variations in the elasticity of substitution are considered, normalisation is necessary in order to exclude arbitrary effects. As an...

This paper studies the properties of a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model - a combination of a static two-good, two-factor Heckscher-Ohlin trade model and a two-sector growth model - with infinitely lived consumers where international borrowing and lending are not permitted. We obtain two main...

In this paper, I show that Hicks neutral technical change is identified as the information of order sigma; obtained if the distribution of factor prices is replaced by the distribution of factor efficiency parameters. Together with Solow's residual, the information method enables us to...