Specialization across goods and export quality

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Alcala, Francisco
• 署名单位: University of Murcia
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2015.09.005
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 216-232
• 关键词: comparative advantage; Absolute advantage; QUALITY; Vertical differentiation; Cournot competition

摘要

This paper explores the link between specialization across goods and specialization within goods along the quality dimension. It develops a tractable many-country, many-industry Ricardian model with an integer number of heterogeneous firms producing each good, under a generic assumption about the distributions of firm efficiencies. In equilibrium, each country exports a range of qualities for each good that overlaps with the ranges of other countries following patterns that relate to wage differences, trade frictions, and absolute advantage. Under plausible assumptions and conditional on wages, the average quality of a country's exports within an industry increases with the country's revealed comparative advantage in the industry. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.