For decades, the literature on the estimation of production functions has focused on the elimination of endogeneity biases through different estimation procedures to obtain the correct factor elasticities and other relevant parameters. Theoretical discussions of the problem correctly assume that...

We study changes in 130 countries' indices of revealed comparative advantage for 1,240 products between 1995 and 2010, to answer: (i) whether export diversification is path-dependent, and whether it is more difficult to diversify into more sophisticated products; and (ii) whether education helps...

This paper asks, first, whether today's developing economies can achieve high-income status without first building large manufacturing sectors. We find that practically every economy that enjoys a high income today experienced a manufacturing employment share in excess of 18%-20% sometime since...

We investigate the claim that national labor markets have become more globally interconnected in recent decades. We do so by deriving estimates over time of three different notions of interconnection: (i) the share of labor demand that is export induced (i.e., all labor demand created by foreign...

The possible endogeneity of labor and capital in production functions, and the consequent bias of the estimated elasticities, has been discussed and addressed in the literature in different ways since the 1940s. This paper revisits an argument first outlined in the 1950s, which questioned...

We provide the first evidence that low- and middle-income countries with high education levels were more successful in developing comparative advantage in products unrelated to those they already export. In contrast, controlling for the relatedness of target products to these countries' exports,...

Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less-lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s. A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which...

Within the attempts to understand Mexican economic inequality, returns to education have received a great deal of attention. The driving question has been: why are Mexican wages so unequal? This paper argues that not only the distribution of human capital matters, but also sociodemographic...

We examine the effects of trade and services liberalization on wage inequality in India. We find that labor reallocations and wage shifts attributable to liberalization account for at most 29% of the increase in inequality between 1993 and 2004, and that effects of services reforms are many...