This dissertation seeks to empirically examine the hypotheses suggested by the model of trade in manufactured goods, based on international differences in relative abundance of labor skills and on inter-country differences in ability to develop new products. Extensive theoretical and empirical literature shows that the traditional trade theory alone fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of modern industrial trade patterns. This study proposes that the neo-factor or skill approach, and the neo-technology or product cycle approach, treated as complementary components of a single framework, offer a potentially useful tool for examining national manufacturing export structures. The two approaches, initially meant to explain export performance of the U.S. industries, are found to perform well in the cross-country study covering a wide variety of economies. The empirical analysis produces some tentative evidence that the neo-factor approach and the neo-technology approach are especially well suited to explain trade composition in two different classes of manufactures, "mature" and "new" products, respectively. Further, the two theories are tested against data covering 69 3-digit SITC industrial product groups. Across countries; skill intensity of exports is found to be positively and significantly correlated with various proxies for the availability of skills. Export performance in relatively newly developed products, and in those with high R&D content, turn out to be positively and significantly correlated with various measures of innovative capability. Finally, it is demonstrated that for most of the economies in the sample, export performance over manufactured products with varying skill intensity, R&D content, and age, is subject to intertemporal changes as suggested by the notion of product cycle. / Ph. D.

The following essays examine the nature of product co-production patterns in India—what factors cause these patterns to emerge, and why they are valuable to study. The first chapter establishes a motivation. It takes a measure of product co-production established in the literature—the “proximity” matrix of Hidalgo et al. (2007)—and shows that this measure is an excellent predictor of new product additions by firms and states, even controlling for other potentially relevant explanatory variables. The following chapter employs a reduced-form approach with regression analysis to uncover the factors that could be giving rise to these patterns of co-production. Using this approach, demand complementarities and patterns of input similarity seem to have the most explanatory power for the observed patterns. The final chapter improves the estimation by incorporating product paths and firm profitability into a structural model. We adapt the gravity model of Morales et al. (2015) to our setting to identify costs associated with adding new products based on characteristics of the relationship between the firm and its potential products. In the model, firms seek to expand their product scope into the most profitable products, where this profit is diminished by “distance” they would have to traverse through a characteristic space. Using the moment inequalities method of Pakes et al. (forthcoming), we are able to estimate which dimensions in that space have the greatest effect on firm profits. We find the physical distance to the nearest location of production had the greatest impact, followed by input similarity between their products and potential products.

No description available.

Originally presented as the author's dissertation-- Universität Regensburg, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Master / Master of Philosophy

No description available.

No description available.

Intern. Business School, Diss.--Jönköping, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 1, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-73).