Browsing by Subject "Vertical differentiation"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Firms’ Main Market, Human Capital, and Wages
    (Springer, 2010-01-08) Alcalá, Francisco; Hernández, Pedro Jesús; Fundamentos del Análisis Económico
    The literature on the exporter wage premium has focused on an exporter/non-exporter dichotomy. Instead, this paper provides first evidence that there is a more continuous destination-market effect. Using Spanish data, we estimate wage premia for establishments selling to the national, European Union, and rest of the world markets (with respect to wages in local-market establishments). Controlling for worker and establishment characteristics, output-market wage premia are increasing in market remoteness and employee education. Establishment human capital is also increasing in output-market remoteness. The paper builds a theoretical model that provides a potential explanation for these empirical results, which is also consistent with the recent evidence on the positive relationship between output-market remoteness and quality of exports.
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    Open Access
    Specialization across goods and export quality
    (2014-05-05) Alcalá, Francisco; Fundamentos del Análisis Económico
    This paper explores the link between international specialization across goods and within goods along the quality dimension. The analysis is performed in a multi-country model with an integer number of efficiency heterogeneous firms producing each good and under reasonably general assumptions on the shape of firm efficiency distributions and market structure. In equilibrium, each country exports a range of qualities for each good that overlaps with the ranges of other countries following patterns that relate to differences in wages, trade frictions and absolute advantage. If firm efficiency is quality biased (i.e., the relative productivity of more efficient firms is higher when producing higher quality) then, conditional on wages, the average quality of the exports within an industry increases with the country’s international specialization in that industry.