Comparative Advantage, the Rank-size Rule, and Zipf's Law

Jeroen Hinloopen and Charles Marrewijk

No 06-100/1, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and Ibragimov (2006) we find strong evidence in favor of the rank-size rule along the time, country, and sector dimension for three different levels of data aggregation. The estimated power exponents that characterize the distribution of revealed comparative advantage are stable over time but differ between countries and sectors. These differences are related empirically to country and sector characteristics, including population size, GDP, and factor intensities.

Keywords: Revealed comparative advantage; Balassa index; rank-size rule; Zipf’s Law; power law; Pareto distribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C33 F1 L1 O5 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-11-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/06100.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:tin:wpaper:20060100

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().