Accounting for Trade Patterns

Stephen Redding and David Weinstein

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We develop a quantitative framework for decomposing trade patterns. We derive price indexes that determine comparative advantage and the aggregate cost of living. If firms and products are imperfect substitutes, we show that these price indexes depend on variety, average appeal (including quality), and the dispersion of appeal-adjusted prices. We show that they are only weakly related to standard empirical measures of average prices. We find that 40 percent of the cross-section variation in comparative advantage, and 90 percent of the time-series variation, is accounted for by variety and average appeal, with less than 10 percent attributed to average prices.

Keywords: comparative advantage; trade; prices; quality; variety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F11 F12 F14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 120 pages
Date: 2024-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
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https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2024/adrm/ces/CES-WP-24-07.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Accounting for trade patterns (2024)
Working Paper: Accounting for Trade Patterns (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:24-07

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