EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Estimating Cross-Country Differences in Product Quality

Juan Hallak and Peter Schott

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2011, vol. 126, issue 1, 417-474

Abstract: We develop a method for decomposing countries' observed export prices into quality versus quality-adjusted components using information contained in trade balances. Holding observed export prices constant, countries with trade surpluses are inferred to offer higher quality than countries running trade deficits. We account for variation in trade balances induced by horizontal and vertical differentiation, and we estimate the evolution of manufacturing quality for top exporters from 1989 to 2003. We find that observed unit value ratios can be a poor approximation for relative quality differences, countries' quality is converging more rapidly than their income, and countries appear to vary in terms of displaying "high-quality" versus "low-price" growth strategies. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (322)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjq003 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Estimating Cross-Country Differences in Product Quality (2008) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:126:y:2011:i:1:p:417-474

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:126:y:2011:i:1:p:417-474