Is the Border Effect an Artefact of Geographical Aggregation?
The existence of a large border effect is considered as one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics. We show that the border effect is, to a large extent, an artefact of geographic concentration. In order to do so we combine international flows with intra-national flows data characterised by a high geographic grid. At this fine grid, intra-national flows are highly localised and dropping sharply with distance. The use of a small geographical unit of reference to measure intra-national bilateral trade flows allows to estimating correctly the negative impact of distance on shipments. When we use sector disaggregated export flows of 50 Spanish provinces in years 2000 and 2005 split…
Factor productivity differences and missing trade problems in a regional HOV model
Recent empirical papers testing the performance of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) model suggest the need to relax its restrictive assumptions in order to reconcile the theory with the data. This paper examines whether introducing factor productivity differences could help to improve the performance of the HOV model in a regional setting. Using a new dataset of 17 Spanish regions and three different HOV specifications, this paper seeks the existence of Hicks-neutral (HN) or factor-augmenting industry-neutral (FAIN) technological differences. The data support the existence of HN technological differences, which contributes to a remarkable improvement of the regional HOV performance since the…
The factor content of regional bilateral trade: The role of technology and demand
Abstract The Heckscher–Ohlin–Vanek (HOV) model in its strict form has been strongly rejected by the data. Relaxing some assumptions of the standard HOV model is key to find improvements in its performance. We apply the Davis and Weinstein (2001) methodology to analyse the validity of the HOV model using regions rather than countries. Surprisingly, our results using data for 17 Spanish regions are similar to theirs with international data for OECD countries. Accounting for technological differences improves the predictive capacity of the factor proportions model and including trade costs and geography reduces significantly the missing trade problem. However, relaxing the assumption of factor…