Lesotho and other least developed African countries responded impressively to the preferences they were granted under the African Growth and Opportunities Act with a rapid increase in their clothing exports to the US. But this performance has not been accompanied by some of the more dynamic...

Conventional trade theory, which combines the Heckscher-Ohlin theory and the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, implies that expanded trade between developed and developing countries will increase wage inequality in the developed countries. This theory is widely applied. It serves as the basis for...

This Paper challenges two widely held views: first that trade performance has been the primary reason for the declining share of manufacturing employment in the United States and other industrial economies, and second that recent productivity growth in manufacturing has actually been quite rapid...

This study uses both a net factor content analysis and a small simulation model to explore the impact on the U.S. labor market of a fivefold increase in imports of manufactured goods from developing countries. The simulation, which is parameterized by the US economy in 1990, involves a balanced...

It is commonly argued that Japanese trade protection has enabled the nurturing and development internationally competitive firms. The results in our paper suggest that when it comes to TFP growth, this view of Japan is seriously erroneous. We find that lower tariffs and higher import volumes...

This paper compares the responses of intra- and extra-firm trade to exchange rate changes. It does so both to inform the debate on whether these responses are qualitatively different and to improve understanding of the microfoundations of features of trade behavior such as long adjustment lags,...

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.1/MathJax.js?config=AM_HTMLorMML-full"></script>As shown in the 1930s by Hicks and Robinson the elasticity of substitution (`sigma`) is a key parameter that captures whether capital and labor are gross complements or substitutes. Establishing the magnitude of `sigma` is vital, not only for explaining changes in the distribution of income...

This paper summarizes and extends previous research on the relationship between low-wage international competition and wage performance in the Developed Countries in the 1980s. The first section argues that poor average US wage performance reflects slow domestic productivity growth rather than...

There is a broad consensus among US opinion leaders that our economic problem is largely one of failures of international competition -- that trade deficits have eroded our manufacturing base, that inability to sell on world markets has been a major drag on economic growth, and that imports from...