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"Helpman, Elhanan"
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Trade, FDI, and the Organization of Firms
New developments in the world economy have triggered research designed to better understand the changes in trade and investment patterns, and the reorganization of production across national borders. Although traditional trade theory has much to offer in explaining parts of this puzzle, other parts required new approaches. Particularly acute has been the need to model alternative forms of involvement of business firms in foreign activities because organizational change has been central in the transformation of the world economy. This paper reviews the literature that has emerged from these efforts. The theoretical refinements have focused on the individual firm, studying its choices in response to its own characteristics, the nature of the industry in which it operates, and the opportunities afforded by foreign trade and investment. Important among these choices are organizational features, such as sourcing strategies. But the theory has gone beyond the individual firm, studying the implications of firm behavior for the structure of industries. It provides new explanations for trade structure and patterns of foreign direct investment, both within and across industries, and has identified new sources of comparative advantage.
Journal Article
Globalization and inequality
Helpman summarizes two decades of research about the connections among international trade, offshoring, immigration, and changes in net income. The overwhelming conclusion is that globalization has created a small rise in inequality. Other factors must be responsible for most of the rise; evidence suggests the chief culprit is technological change that heavily favors highly skilled workers.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Identity Politics and Trade Policy
We characterize trade policies that result from political competition when assessments of wellbeing include both material and psychosocial components. The material component reflects, as usual, satisfaction from consumption. Borrowing from social identity theory,we take the psychosocial component as combining the pride and self-esteem an individual draws from the status of groups with which she identifies and a dissonance cost she bears from identifying with those that are different from herself. In this framework, changes in social identification patterns that may result, for example, from increased income inequality or heightened class or ethnic tensions, lead to pronounced changes in trade policy. We analyse the nature of these policy changes.
Journal Article
Globalization and Growth
How does globalization affect economic growth? We discuss mechanisms that link international integration to the incentives for knowledge accumulation and the efficacy of that process. First, integration facilitates the flow of knowledge across national borders. Second, integration affords innovators a larger potential market even as it subjects them to additional competition from foreign rivals. Third, integration encourages specialization according to comparative advantage. Finally, integration affects the incentives for technological diffusion. Taken together, the literature offers many theoretical insights. Some progress has also been made on the empirical side, although data and methodological impediments have left assessment and measurement lagging behind.
Journal Article
Income Distribution, Product Quality, and International Trade
We develop a framework for studying trade in horizontally and vertically differentiated products. In our model, consumers with heterogeneous incomes and tastes purchase a homogeneous good and make a discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated product. The distribution of preferences generates a nested-logit demand structure such that the fraction of consumers who buy a higher-quality product rises with income. The model features a home-market effect that helps to explain why richer countries export higher-quality goods. It provides a tractable tool for studying the welfare consequences of trade and trade policy for different income groups in an economy.
Journal Article
Balanced growth despite Uzawa
The evidence for the United States points to balanced growth despite falling investment-good prices and a less-than-unitary elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. This is inconsistent with the Uzawa Growth Theorem. We extend Uzawïs theorem to show that the introduction of human capital accumulation in the standard way does not resolve the puzzle. However, balanced growth is possible if education is endogenous and capital is more complementary with schooling than with raw labor. We present a class of aggregate production functions for which a neoclassical growth model with capital-augmenting technological progress and endogenous schooling converges to a balanced growth path.
Journal Article
Matching, Sorting, and the Distributional Effects of International Trade
We study the distributional consequences of trade in a world with two industries and two heterogeneous factors of production. Productivity in each production unit reflects the ability of the manager and the abilities of the workers, with complementarity between the two.We begin by examining the forces that govern the sorting of worker and manager types to industries and the matching of workers and managers within industries. We then consider how changes in relative output prices generated by changes in the trading environment affect sorting, matching, and the distributions of wages and salaries.
Journal Article
Contracts and Technology Adoption
We develop a tractable framework for the analysis of the relationship between contractual incompleteness, technological complementarities, and technology adoption. In our model, a firm chooses its technology and investment levels in contractible activities by suppliers of intermediate inputs. Suppliers then choose investments in noncontractible activities, anticipating payoffs from an ex post bargaining game. We show that greater contractual incompleteness leads to the adoption of less advanced technologies, and that the impact of contractual incompleteness is more pronounced when there is greater complementary among the intermediate inputs. We study a number of applications of the main framework and show that the mechanism proposed in the paper can generate sizable productivity differences across countries with different contracting institutions, and that differences in contracting institutions lead to endogenous comparative advantage differences.
Journal Article
Sources of Wage Inequality
Recent theories of firm heterogeneity emphasize between-firm wage differences as a new mechanism through which trade can affect wage inequality. Using linked employer-employee data for Sweden, we show that many of the stylized facts about wage inequality found in Helpman et al. (2012) for Brazil also hold for Sweden. Much of overall wage inequality arises within sector-occupations and for workers with similar observable characteristics. One notable difference is a smaller contribution from between-firm differences in wages in Sweden, which could reflect the influence of Swedish labor market institutions in dampening the scope for variation in wages between firms through collective wage agreements.
Journal Article