This paper develops a dynamic model of trade and growth that we use to study how openness affects economic growth. In our model, heterogeneous firms choose to either produce with their existing technology or search within the domestic economy to adopt a better technology. These choices determine...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the nonagricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, particularly in developing countries. Taken at face value, this “agricultural productivity gap†suggests that labor is greatly...

In this paper, I develop a quantitative, general equilibrium theory of product quality and international trade. In the model, producers make choices regarding the quality/technology of their intermediate inputs given the set of endowments they have access to. This choice affects the producers...

Most developing countries are far less productive in agriculture than in the non-agriculture sector compared to the rest of the world. Standard Ricardian trade theory predicts that developing countries should be large importers of food and should have few workers in agriculture. The data is in...

the data. I show that reductions in barriers to trade are quantitatively important---they can reduce income differences by up to 56 percent.

Cross-country labor productivity differences are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. We propose a new explanation for these patterns in which the self-selection of heterogeneous workers determines sector productivity. We formalize our theory in a general-equilibrium Roy model in which...

Quantitative results from a large class of structural gravity models of international trade depend critically on the elasticity of trade with respect to trade frictions. We develop a new simulated method of moments estimator to estimate this elasticity from disaggregate price and trade-flow data...

Recent studies argue that cross-country labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture than in the aggregate. We reexamine the agricultural productivity data underlying this conclusion using new evidence from disaggregate sources. We find that for the world's staple...

This paper studies the dynamics of international trade flows at business cycle frequencies. We show that introducing dynamic considerations into an otherwise standard model of trade can account for several puzzling features of trade flows at business cycle frequencies. Our insight is that...

According to national accounts data, value added per worker is much higher in the non-agricultural sector than in agriculture in the typical country, and particularly so in developing countries. Taken at face value, this "agricultural productivity gap" suggests that labor is greatly misallocated...