Search results for "Factor price"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Is Spain a lumpy country? A dynamic analysis of the ‘lens condition’
2008
We implement the ‘lens condition’ of Deardoff (1994) to investigate whether lumpiness, an excessively uneven geographic distribution of production factors, is large enough to allow for regional specialization of production at different factor prices. Using data from 50 Spanish provinces over the period 1964 to 2001, we show that Spain evolved from being a lumpy economy to a state where lumpiness no longer mattered.
When Stolper-Samuelson Does Not Apply: International Trade and Female Labor
2011
Whenever a country specializes on industries that use female labor intensively, its female labor force participation should increase. This intuition, which bases on the Stolper-Samuleson Theorem, may fail in a three-factor, two-good model. We develop a model where capital, male and female work are distinct factors of production. We follow an established assumption and postulate that capital accumulation closes the gender wage gap. In this setup, the Stolper-Samuleson based intuition fails necessarily: the gender wage gap widens in countries that specialize on sectors intensive in female labor, and vice versa.
Wages and prices in early Catalan industrialisation
2014
Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British Industrial Revolution in the second third of the nineteenth century. The roots of this industrialisation process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became successfully integrated in international trade and the region enjoyed an intensification of its agrarian and proto-industrial activities. These capitalist developments were subsequently reinforced by a successful printed calico manufacturing business concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning j…
Fair Wages and Unemployment in a Small Open Economy
2006
In this paper we develop a model of a multi-sector multi-factor small open economy with involuntary unemployment due to fair wages. The model is used inter alia to analyse the labour market effects of changes in unemployment benefits and the domestic labour supply. Our analysis covers both the case where factor prices do not react to endowment changes - as in the Heckscher-Ohlin model - and the case where they do. Results are sensitive to this distinction, thereby emphasizing the benefit of employing a general production structure that encompasses both cases.
Wages, prices, and technology in early Catalan industrialization
2015
Catalonia was the only Mediterranean region among the early followers of the British industrial revolution. The roots of this process can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Catalan economy became integrated into international trade, and a successful printed calico industry concentrated in the city of Barcelona. Although the factory system was largely adopted by the cotton industry in the 1840s, the diffusion of the spinning jenny in Catalonia had occurred earlier, in the 1790s. In line with Allen, this article explores whether relative factor prices played a role in the widespread adoption of the spinning jenny in Catalonia. First, series of real wages in Ba…
The factor content of regional bilateral trade: The role of technology and demand
2011
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…