The Empirical Dynamics of Comparative Advantage

具体行业的特点如何影响国际贸易的跨国流动？ 全球贸易动态的变化是否至少部分是特定行业生产率随时间演变的结果？数据显示，纵观地球仪，任何国家在任何时刻的国际贸易成功都集中在少数几种产品上。 然而，这些出口产品随着时间的推移而变化;今年的最大出口商品很可能不是未来的最大出口商品。 国家出口成功的这两个持续特征是否源于同一过程？ 该项目使用了一大批国家之间五十年进出口的数据，以检验关于产业特征如何决定全球贸易模式的假设。 这项研究将帮助我们了解新兴经济体快速增长的力量，并将帮助我们预测未来的贸易流量。研究小组开发了一个实证框架，以描述国家出口绩效的动态，并将该框架应用于50年来关于一致定义的贸易流量的分类数据，这些数据包括所有商品部门和进行大部分全球贸易的一大批国家。贸易 他们用一种新的方法指定和估计的扩散将比较优势的随机增长（捕获随机的产品创新或新能力的发现）与现有优势的耗散（捕获收益递减或资源耗尽）结合起来。 该团队将通过创新和资源发现模型建立微观基础，开发一个多变量随机过程，允许出口增长中的跨国和跨行业联系（例如，由于全球生产网络的联系），并探索出口增长与国家特征变化之间的联系。

How do the characteristics of specific industries shape the way international trade flows across national borders? Are changes in global trade dynamics at least partly the result of how industry productivity evolves over time in specific industries? Data show that across the globe, any country's success in international trade at any moment in time is concentrated in just a few products. However, those export products change over time; the top export goods this year will most likely not be the top export goods in the future. Are these two persistent features of country export success due to the same process? This project uses data from five decades of exports and imports between a large group of countries to test hypotheses about how industry characteristics determine global trade patterns. The research will help us understand the forces responsible for the rapid growth of emerging economies, and will help us to predict future trade flows.The research team develops an empirical framework to characterize the dynamics of country export performance, and will apply the framework to five decades of disaggregate data on consistently defined trade flows that include all merchandise sectors and a large set of countries conducting the bulk of global trade. The diffusion they specify and estimate with a novel procedure combines stochastic growth in comparative advantage (capturing random product innovations or discoveries of new capabilities) with the dissipation of existing advantages (capturing diminishing returns or resource depletion). The team will develop micro-foundations via a model of innovation and resource discovery, develop a multivariate stochastic process that allows for cross-country and cross-industry linkages in export growth (eg, linkages due to global productions networks), and explore the connection between export growth and changes in country characteristics.