British and American Productivity and Comparative Costs in International Trade 1

Beyond Ricardo: Assignment Models in International Trade

“…This in turn means that the differences in labor requirements cannot be observed, since imported goods will almost never be produced in the importing country." Accordingly, empirical work on the cross-sectional implications of the Ricardian model has proceeded by imposing ad-hoc specifications, as in MacDougall (1951), Stern (1962), Balassa (1963), and Golub & Hsieh (2000), or strong distributional assumptions on the extent of unobserved labor productivity, as in Costinot, Donaldson & Komunjer (2012). propose an alternative empirical strategy that relies instead on productivity and price data from the FAO for 17 major agricultural crops and 55 major agricultural countries.…”

The Empirics of General Equilibrium Trade Theory: What Have We Learned?

“…MacDougall found that in those industries in which the US had a higher productivity advantage it had also a higher share on the export market relative to the UK. Subsequently, Stern (1962) and Balassa (1963) built upon MacDougall by using different data and methodology and also found a consistently positive and significant correlation between US and UK relative export shares and the corresponding productivity ratios.…”

Unit Values, Productivity, and Trade - Determinants of Spanish Export Strength

“…Following MacDougall (1951, 1952, Stern (1962), and Balassa (1963), we use export ratios as a measure of trade. As in Balassa, we use exports to third markets.…”

“…Since the early studies by MacDougall (MacDougall, 1951, 1952and MacDougall et al, 1962, as well as those by Stern (1962), Balassa (1963), andMcGilvray, J. andSimpson, D. (1973), only a few authors have recently evaluated this relationship from an empirical standpoint. Golub and Hsieh (2000) assessed the contemporary relevance of the classical model for U.S. trade over the period from 1970 through 1992.…”