Publications

The paper seeks to address the growing inequality in wages between skilled and unskilled workers and between male and female workers in India due to a growing import surge from China. The study on wage movements of skilled versus unskilled workers helps us to understand how imports from India’s largest trade partner have contributed to relative factor returns in the country’s most abundant factor of production. The consideration of wage divergence between male and female workers helps us in determining how significant China’s trade is in addressing gender inequality in India’s labour market. Our analysis reveals that the import surge from China has minor effects on the growing wage difference between skilled and unskilled workers. However, the effect of the Chinese import surge on wage divergence between male and female workers is significant. The existing literature on the effects of international trade on India labour market is largely silent on the considered aspects.

This research investigates the effectiveness of an early academic intervention in Principles of Economics courses at a large public university. After the end of the fourth week of classes, students who fell below a 70% threshold on a performance measure, or had an attendance rate below 75%, were referred to the university’s Student Success Center for additional academic support. A referral consisted of students being informed of their status and being given optional assistance in course specific skills through tutoring, as well as training in general skills like time management and study skills. Using a regression discontinuity framework at the referral threshold, we find that the performance intervention improved student scores on common questions on the final exam by 6.5 to 7.5 percentage points for students at or near the performance threshold. The gains are particularly large for students who entered college with below average math placement scores. These results indicate that low-cost light-touch interventions may significantly affect student academic performance.

The problem of regressor endogeneity stemming from reverse casuality is one that has plagued economists working in the field of empirical economic growth for some time. This paper attempts to address the relevant magnitude of this issue in the context of growth regressions based on the Solow growth model. The paper develops a method of running Monte Carlo simulations that allows us to generate simulated data that match the moments of observed real-world data typically used in such regressions while simultaneously allowing us to impose arbitrarily high correlations between the steady-state determinants of the Solow model and the unobserved residual term of the data-generating process. After running simulations that represent a wide sample of the mathematically-possible correlations, we conclude that a between estimator or a random effects estimator will deliver a lower average absolute bias across all coefficients than alternative estimators in almost all of our simulations. Conversely, estimators that use within-country variation will generate lower biases when looking solely at rates of convergence. Furthermore, we conclude that these results are robust when restricting our sample of simulations to several subsets of the assumed parameters and to changing our assumptions about country fixed-effects terms.

The practice of using Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) Indices to determine the flow of goods trade among countries is well established. But an important issue that demands attention is whether the RCA indices reflect the essentials of comparative advantage theory. Deb and Basu (2011) examined the consistency of alternative RCA indices with the Heckscher-Ohlin theory of comparative advantage, leaving scope for re-examination of the indices in the context of the Ricardian comparative advantage theory, which insists on relative factor productivity differences among countries contrary to Heckscher-Ohlin’s relative factor endowment differences. The other issue which has been overlooked in much of the existing literature is the importance of value-added trade. With the growing importance of global production chains, RCA indices based on gross export values may not portray an accurate picture of the underlying comparative advantage of countries. In this context, adjusting the RCA indices to incorporate domestic value-added in exports seems to be quite relevant. This paper explores the consistency of RCA indices based on domestic value-added in exports with the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage using a panel data approach. A brief review on the structures of alternative RCA indices is also provided. The Log-of-Balassa index is found to be the best performer in this empirical examination, although the deficiencies of the index for cross-country or cross-commodity comparison must be acknowledged. The index of Yu et al. (2009) does possess the latter feature but in our study its performance is quite poor and hence its consistency with the Ricardian theory of comparative advantage is questionable.

We study how trade protection varies with the electoral rules for legislative representation. In particular, we investigate different hypotheses about why trade policy differs between countries with legislatures elected by a plurality election rule in single member constituencies and legislatures elected by a proportional, or party-list, rule. Our results, which are in line with the existing literature, show that countries with list-PR systems tend to have lower trade barriers than countries with majoritarian systems. We expand on this literature by looking at the mechanisms through which this correlation can be explained. Our findings indicate that, contrary to existing theory, neither constituency size nor party strength are important when explaining this correlation. Country size does matter, but does not explain the whole of the correlation.

We analyze convergence of per capita income across the US states for the period 1929–2011. We find that absolute convergence was in evidence early, but it broke down around 1978. It appears to have returned in 1990, although more weakly than before. We use two standard metrics to evaluate convergence: (1) σ-convergence, a reduction in the SD of state per capita income and (2) β-convergence, the fact that poor states grow faster than rich states.

The proper way to measure differences in trade protection across countries and economic sectors has been a vexing problem for economists studying international trade. Based on research by Anderson and Neary (2005) and Kee et al. (2009), this article proposes the use of Trade Restriction Indices (TRIs) when studying US trade policy. TRIs can potentially solve several problems related to measuring the restrictiveness of trade policy. To this end, this article creates a data set of TRIs for US imports by sector at several different levels of aggregation using the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HS), the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and the Standard International Trade Classification industry coding systems.

This article describes the creation of a new dataset on sectoral-level import and export elasticities in the U.S. between the years 1978 and 2001. It proposes the use of panel data techniques as a means of generating import price indexes, and then using them to measure trade elasticities while instrumenting for the endogeneous variables. In particular, it provides a dataset listing trade elasticities for a broad range of sectors at the North American Industry Classification System 4-digit, and 6-digit and the Harmonized Tariff System 6-digit, and 10-digit levels of industry aggregation. These results are compared to previous estimates in the literature. The resulting estimates can be used in a wide-range of applications in empirical studies of international trade policy, particularly in analyzing the welfare effects of international trade.

What effect, if any, does legislative malapportionment have on international trade protection? This paper argues that in malapportioned legislatures, such as the U.S. Senate, industries become over‐represented in a legislature if they are disproportionately located in small constituencies. As a result, industries that are disproportionately located in smaller constituencies are likely to receive greater protection from international trade. To argue this point theoretically, this paper develops a new model, combining legislative bargaining and a model of lobbying to study trade protection while allowing for a legislature with multiple legislators and differently sized constituencies. We then test the predictions of this new model using tariff votes from the U.S. Senate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a panel of tariffs and non‐tariff barriers to trade in the U.S. in the 1990s. Considerable support is found for the model’s predictions. Industries concentrated in states where the population is low receive greater protection from imports.

Using Monte Carlo simulations, this paper evaluates the bias properties of estimators commonly used to estimate growth regressions derived from the Solow model. We explicitly allow for measurement error, country-specific fixed effects and regressor endogeneity. An OLS estimator applied to a single cross-section of variables averaged over time (the between estimator) performs best in terms of the extent of bias on each of the estimated coefficients. Fixed-effects and the Arellano–Bond GMM estimator overstate the speed of convergence under a wide variety of assumptions, while the between estimator understates it. Finally, fixed effects and Arellano–Bond bias towards zero the slope estimates on the human and physical capital accumulation variables, while the between estimator and the Blundell–Bond system GMM estimator bias these coefficients upwards.

Using data on authorizations from the 2005 Highway Bill, we show that the legislative allocation of pork barrel spending by US state (measured by the value of transportation earmarks per capita) greatly favors smaller states. We exploit the difference between two versions of the bill: the version that was passed by the House and the compromise version passed in conference committee. Our empirical results provide strong evidence in favor of theories of legislative malapportionment.