Includes bibliographical references ( p. [123]-127) and index.
Contents:
Introduction -- Consumer benefits from import variety -- Producer benefits from export variety -- The extensive margin of trade and country productivity -- Product variety and the measurement of real GDP -- Conclusions.
Summary:
"Robert Feenstra masterfully synthesizes trade theory and evidence in a volume that provides the foundation for how economists should think about the modern theory of the gains from trade. This book is one of the most important monographs produced in the last two decades and will be required reading for anyone interested in why countries gain from trade."-David E. Weinstein, Carl S. Shoup Professor of the Japanese Economy, Columbia University -- Book Jacket. "This book provides the most comprehensive treatment to date of the role of 'product variety' in international trade. Starting with an overview of the main theoretical concepts, Robert Feenstra takes the reader step by step through the measurement and identification challenges of empirical work that tries to quantify the gains from variety. The book is a must-read not only for graduate students, but for anyone who is interested in familiarizing herself with the latest developments in international trade."-Penny Goldberg, Professor of Economics, Princeton University -- Book Jacket. "This book is a brilliant exploration of the implications of recent theories of international trade for one of the most important questions in the field: how large are the gains from trade? Feenstra takes the models apart to shed light on the basic mechanisms at play and then masterfully uses the data to understand their quantitative significance."-AndrTs Rodriquez-Clare, Professor of Economics, Pennsylvania State University -- Book Jacket. The application of the monopolistic competition model to international trade by Elhanan Helpman, Paul Krugman, and Kelvin Lancaster was one of the great achievements of international trade theory in the 1970's and 1980's. Monopolistic competition models have required new empirical methods to implement their theoretical insights, however, and in this book Robert Feenstra describes methods that have been developed to measure the product variety of imports and the gains from trade that are due to product variety. -- Book Jacket. Feenstra first considers the consumer benefits from having access to new import varieties of differentiated products, and examines a recent method to estimate the elasticity of substitution (the extent of differentiation across products) and to use that information to construct the gains from import variety. He then examines claims of producer benefit from export variety, arguing that the self-selection of the more productive firms (as the low-productivity firms exit the market) can be interpreted as a gain from product variety. He makes use of a measurement of product variety known as the extensive margin of exports and imports. Finally, he considers an alternative approach to quantifying the gains due to product variety by comparing real GDP calculated with and without the extensive margin of trade. --Book Jacket.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.