TY  - BOOK
AU  - Bombardini,Matilde
AU  - Gallipoli,Giovanni
AU  - Pupato,Germán
ED  - National Bureau of Economic Research.
TI  - Skill Dispersion and Trade Flows
T2  - NBER working paper series
PY  - 2009///
CY  - Cambridge, Mass.
PB  - National Bureau of Economic Research
N1  - June 2009; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
N2  - Is skill dispersion a source of comparative advantage? While it is established that a country's aggregate endowment of human capital is an important determinant of comparative advantage, this paper investigates whether the distribution of skills in the labor force can play a role in the determination of trade flows. We develop a multi-country, multi-sector model of trade in which comparative advantage derives from (i) differences across sectors in the complementarity of workers' skills, (ii) the dispersion of skills in the working population. First, we show how higher dispersion in human capital can trigger specialization in sectors characterized by higher substitutability among workers' skills. We then use industry-level bilateral trade data to show that human capital dispersion, as measured by a standard international metric, has a significant effect on trade flows. We find that the effect is of a magnitude comparable to that of aggregate endowments. The result is robust to the introduction of several controls for other proximate causes of comparative advantage
UR  - https://www.nber.org/papers/w15097
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w15097
ER  -