Lorenzo Caliendo

On the Dynamics of the Hecksher-Ohlin Theory

Over the last decades, large labor intensive countries, like China, have played a growing role in world trade. Using the factor proportions theory, this paper investigates the dynamic effects of economic growth consequent to international trade between countries with different factor proportions. I present a complete characterization of the equilibrium dynamics with initial factor endowments outside the cone of diversification where factor prices are not equalized and either one or both of the countries specialize. I Â…find that while a small country can grow without the retarding force of a terms-of-trade deterioration, a large, capital-intensive country can experience terms-of-trade deteriorations, as a consequence of trading with a large, labor-intensive partner. These terms-of-trade effects have consequences over growth and the pattern of specialization in production. For instance, the capital stock of the poor country can overshoot its long-run steady state. However, at the steady state, the labor intensive country will always remain poorer compared to the capital intensive country. The model can also help to explain why countries experience non-monotonic changes in their pattern of specialization as they grow, why countries do not converge to the same steady state level of income, and why non-factor price equalizations might be the most likely outcome after all.

Productivity and Organization in Portuguese Firms

The productivity of firms is, at least partly, determined by a firms actions and decisions. One of these decisions involves the organization of production in terms of the number of layers of management the firm decides to employ. Using detailed employer-employee matched data and firm production quantity and input data for Portuguese firms, we study the endogenous response of revenue-based and quantity based productivity to a change in layers: a firm reorganization. We show that as a result of an exogenous demand or productivity shock that makes the firm reorganize and add a management layer, quantity based productivity increases by about 4%, while revenue-based productivity drops by more than 4%. Such a reorganization makes the firm more productive, but also increases the quantity produced to an extent that lowers the price charged by the firm and, as a result, its revenue-based productivity.

The Impact of Regional and Sectoral Productivity Changes on the U.S. Economy

We study the impact of intersectoral and interregional trade linkages in propagating disaggregated productivity changes to the rest of the economy. Using U.S. regional and industry data, we obtain the aggregate, regional and sectoral elasticities of measured total factor productivity, GDP, and employment to regional and sectoral productivity changes. We find that the elasticities vary significantly depending on the sectors and regions affected, and are importantly determined by the spatial structure of the economy. We use our calibrated model to perform a variety of counterfactual exercises including several specific studies of the aggregate and disaggregate effects of shocks to productivity and infrastructure. The specific episodes we study include the boom in California’s computer industry, the productivity boom in North Dakota associated with the shale oil boom, the disruptions in New York’s finance and real state industries during the 2008 crisis, as well as the effect of the destruction of infrastructure in Louisiana following hurricane Katrina.

Chapter 3 Welfare Gains from Changing Partners in a Trade Bloc: The Case of MERCOSUR

This chapter applies the new heterogeneous firm CGE model of Caliendo and Parro (2009) to determine what the Ricardian gains are from changing partners for members of a trade bloc. We focus on the MERCOSUR case, using a model with 48 sectors and 5 countries. Motivated by recent policy discussions, we quantify Uruguays trade and welfare effects from signing a Free Trade Agreement with the United States and leaving MERCOSUR. We find positive welfare effects for Uruguay from bilaterally reducing tariffs with the United States. Most of the gains come from having access to lower-cost intermediate inputs for production. We then consider the policy experiment of bilaterally eliminating tariffs between all members of MERCOSUR and the United States. We find that Uruguay has the largest gains, while Argentina and Brazil do not benefit much. This chapter also illustrates how new models are a promising tool for the analysis of trade.