SELECTED RESEARCH
RECENT WORK
BOOKS
SOME UNSOLICITED ADVICE
What should graduate students in international economics be reading?
How should we be teaching economics?
How should we do economics? We need balance, but we usually don’t have it.
We process pictures quite well, words pretty well and numbers hardly at all.
TRADE AND WAGES: What I think about the trade and wages debate
Whose wages are set in Guondong?
How does international trade affect wages?
How does outsourcing affect wages?
EFFORT = TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY
CLOSENESS AS A SOURCE OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
MY OTHER FAVORITES: Other Articles I Am Especially Proud I Wrote
"Location Equilibria," Journal of Regional Science (from my Senior Thesis at Princeton)
Overparameterization is a Huge Problem in Econometrics
Measurement Error is a Killer Disease
Cause and Intervention are Two Words That Should Go Hand in Hand
We Need to Be Very Careful Linking Trade Theory Properly with the Data
The Heckscher-Ohlin Model is Wonderfully Rich
US Wages Can be Affected by International Trade and International Agreements
Contingent Valuation Surveys Should be Done with Extraordinary Care
Classic Books You Cannot Buy Anymore
A Survey of Empirical Work in International Economics
Quantitative International Economics, with R.M. Stern, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1970.
It Isn’t Easy to do Econometrics with Noisy Data Collected in Ambiguous Settings
Specification Searches: Ad Hoc Inference with Non Experimental Data, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1978. Translated into Spanish and Russian.
The Heckscher-Ohlin Model is Much More Accurate Than Theorists Imagine
Sources of International Comparative Advantage: Theory and Evidence, Boston: MIT Press, 1984.
A Not-Yet Classic Book That You Can Still Purchase, If Your Budget Constraint Allows
Sturdy Econometrics: Selected Essays of Edward E. Leamer, Economists of the 20th Century, Hants:Edward Elgar, 1994.
What should graduate students in international economics be reading?
Essential Graduate Readings in International Economics For the Year 2000 and Beyond, International Economics, Worth Series in Outstanding Contributions, edited by Edward E. Leamer, New York: Worth Publishers, 2001.
How should we be teaching economics?
Report of the Commission on Graduate Education in Economics, with Anne Krueger et. al., Journal of Economic Literature, XXIX, (September 1991), 1035-1053.
How should we do economics? We need balance, but we usually don’t have it.
"Questions, Theory and Data," in Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels, Foundations of Research in Economics: How do Economists Do Economics?, Edward Elgar Publishing Co., 1996, pp. 175-190.
We process pictures quite well, words pretty well and numbers hardly at all.
"Revisiting Tobin’s 1950 Study of Food Expenditure," in Jan Magnus and Mary Morgan, ed., Special issue of Journal of Applied Econometrics.
TRADE AND WAGES: What I think about the trade and wgaes debate
Whose wages are set in Guondong?
"A Heckscher-Ohlin View of Sweden Competing in the Global Market," with Per Lundborg, in Richard B. Freeman, Robert Topel and Birgitta Swedenborg, eds. The Welfare State in Transition, The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
How does international trade affect wages?
Natural resources can be a burden:
"Does natural resource abundance increase Latin American income inequality?" with Hugo Maul, Sergio Rodriquez and Peter Schott, Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 615, 1999.
The effect of trade on wages doesn't depend on the quantity of imports:
"What’s the Use of Factor Contents?" Journal of International Economics, forthcoming, 1999.
There were price declines of labor-intensive goods in the 1970s:
"In Search of Stolper-Samuelson Effects on US Wages," in Susan Collins, ed., Imports, Exports and the American Worker, Brookings, 1997.
Wages are not always set by external competitiveness:
"Competition in Tradables as a Driving Force of Rising Income Inequality," in Globalization and Labor, edited by Horst Siebert, Mohr SiebecK Insitut für Welterwirtschaft an der Universität Kiel, 1999.
How does outsourcing affect wages?
The Effects of Trade in Services, Technology Transfer and Delocalisation on Local and Global Income Inequality, Asia-Pacific Economic Review, April 1996, Vol. 2, No. 1, 44-60.
EFFORT = TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY: My new bright idea
Industrious workers attract industry:
"Effort, Wages and the International Division of Labor," Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 107, Number 6, Part 1, December, 1999, 1127-1163, reprinted in Singer, Hans et.al. New World Order Series,Vol. 20, 2001.
CLOSENESS AS A SOURCE OF COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE
How does closeness affect comparative advantage and wages?
"Access to Western Markets and Eastern Effort," in Salvatore Zecchini, ed., Lessons from the Economic Transition, Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 503-526.
"No Resession Any Time Soon, But Troubles Ahead, Nonetheless" December 2005
"Conference Board's Index of Leading Indicators" June 2005
"Red Skies at Night,..." March 2005
"A 2005 Rematch: The Housing Bubble and the Productivity Miracle vs. Reality and Reason" December 2004
"Normal, Again" June 2004
"The Twilight Zone Economy" December 2003
"Looking for the Signs of Spring That Wonldn't Come" September 2003
"The Bush/Clinton Expansion of the 21st Century 'Overspent Consumers, Cautious Businesses and Broke Governments'" May 2003
"The Fourth Imbalance" March 2003
"No News is No News" December 2002
"Waiting Patiently for That 1999 Tech Equipment to become Obsolete" October 2002
"Bubble Trouble? 'Your Home Has a P/E Ration Too'" June 2002
"Should that 5.8% let the Bulls Out?" April 2002
"This is Our First 'Business' Cycle" March 2002
"Not Long, Not Deep But Not Much of a Recovery Either" December 2001
"If it Isn't a Recession, what IS it?" August 2001
"A Severe Power Crisis Hit the US" & "The Alphabet Soup of Forcasts U,V, L," June 2001
"Too Many Pedators and Not Enough Prey: The When and the Why of the Demise of the Bush/Clinton Expansion," April 2001
"B2B and B2C in 2001, Back 2 Bankruptcies and Back 2 Cycles," December 2000
Home Buyers Needed, New York Times, Opinion Section, April 14, 2008
Privatize Social Security; Here's Why, Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2000; reprinted in Newsday
MY OTHER FAVORITES: Other articles I am especially proud I wrote
I wrote this article as my Senior Thesis at Princeton
Location Equilibria, Journal of Regional Science, Vol, 8 (No. 2, 1968), 229-242, reprinted in A.J. Scott, ed., Location Allocation Systems: (San Francisco: Holden-Day, Inc.).
This article came from my Ph.D. Dissertation
A Class of Informative Priors and Distributed Lag Analysis, Econometrica, 40 (November 1972), 1059-81.
Data-instigated models raise a fundamental philosophical problem with inferences from nonexperimental data
False Models and Post-Data Model Construction, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 69 (March 1974), 122-131; abstracted in Zentralblatt fur Mathematik; reprinted in Foundations of Probability, Econometrics and Economic Games, Omar F. Hamouda and J.C.R. Rowley, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 1995.
Overparameterization is a huge problem in econometrics
Multicollinearity: A Bayesian Interpretation, Review of Economics and Statistics, LV (August 1973), 371-380.
A Bayesian Interpretation of Pretesting, with G. Chamberlain, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 38 (No. 1, 1976), 85-94.
Explaining Your Results as Access-Biased Memory, Journal of the American Statistical Association (March 1975), 88-83.
A Result on the Sign of Restricted Least Squares Estimates, Journal of Econometrics, 3 (1975), 387-390.
Matrix Weighted Averages and Posterior Bounds, with G. Chamberlain, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 38 (No. 1 1976), 73-84.
Sets of Estimates of Location, Econometrica, Vol. 49, No. 1 (January 1981), 193-204.
Sets of Posterior Means with Bounded Variance Priors, Econometrica, 50 (May 1982), 725-736.
Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics, American Economics Review, 73 (March 1983), 31-43; reprinted in Bruce J. Caldwell, Criticism and Appraisal in Economics: A Book of Readings (Allen and Unwin, 1985); reprinted in Thomas J. Coyne, Readings in Managerial Economics, 1985; excerpted in Caroline P. Clotfelter, Economic Satire: Wit and Humor in the Dismal Science, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe; summarized in Journal of Forecasting, reprinted in C.W.J. Granger,ed., Modelling Economic Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; reprinted in Dale J. Poirier, The Methodology of Econometrics II, Hants: U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1994; reprinted in Omar F. Hamouda and J.C.R. Rowley, Foundations of Probability, Econometrics and Economic Games, 1996; reprinted in Guy Peters, The International Library of Comparative Public Policy - Series B, 1996
Reporting the Fragility of Regression Estimates, with H. Leonard, Review of Economics and Statistics, LXV (May 1983), 306-3417.
Sets of Weighted Regressions, with C.Z. Gilstein, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 78 (December 1983), 942-948.
Global Sensitivity Analysis for Generalized Least-Squares Estimates, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 79 (December 1984), 867-870.
Bid-Ask Spreads for Subjective Probabilities, in P. Goel and A. Zellner, eds., Bayesian Inference and Decision Techniques, New York: Elsevier, 1985.
Measurement error is a killer disease
Consistent Sets of Estimates for Regression with All Variables Measured with Error, with S. Klepper, Econometrica, 52 (January 1984), 163-183.
Errors-in-Variables in Linear Systems, Econometrica, Vol. 55, No. 4, July, 1987, 893 -909.
Cause and Intervention are two words that should go hand in hand
Vector Autoregressions for Causal Inference? Karl Brunner and Allan H. Meltzer, eds., Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series On Public Policy: Understanding Monetary Regimes, Volume 22, 1985, 255-304; reprinted in Kevin D. Hoover, ed., The New Classical Macroeconomics, The University of California Press at Davis, 1992; reprinted in Dale J. Poirier, The Methodology of Econometrics II, Hants, England: Edward Elgar, 1994.
Wu-Hausman Specification Error Testing is a bad idea
Least Squares Versus Instrumental Variables Estimation in a Simple Errors in Variables Model, Econometrica (July 1978), 961-968.
White corrected standard errors are white-washing
Heteroscedasticity Sensitivity Diagnostics, Sturdy Econometrics, Hants, England: Edward Elgar, 1994.
We need to be very careful linking trade theory properly with the data
The Leontief Paradox, Reconsidered, Journal of Political Economy (June 1980), 495-503; reprinted in J. Bhagwati, ed., International Trade: Selected Readings, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986; reprinted in J. Peter Neary, ed., International Trade: The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics, Edward Elgar, forthcoming, 1994; reprinted in Heinz D. Kruz and Christian Lager, Input-Output Analysis, Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 1997.
A Multi-Country Multi-Factor Test of the Factor Abundance Theory, with H.P. Bowen and L. Sveikauskus, American Economic Review, 77, no. 5, December 1987, 791 - 809; reprinted in Peter Neary, ed., International Trade: The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics, London: Edward Elgar Publishing, Ltd., .
International Trade Theory: The Evidence, with James Levinsohn, G. Grossman and K. Rogoff, eds., Handbook of International Economics, Vol III, 1995, pp. 1339-1394.
The Heckscher-Ohlin Model is wonderfully rich
Paths of Development in the Three-Good n-Factor General Equilibrium Model, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 95, No. 5, October, 1987, 961-999.
The Heckscher-Ohlin Model in Theory and Practice, Graham Lecture, Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 77, February 1995.
US wages can be affected by international trade and international agreements
U.S. Wages and the Mexican-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Peter Garber, ed., The Mexico-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1994, pp. 57-128.
U.S. Manufacturing and an Emerging Mexico, The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1993, 51-89.
Contingent Valuation Surveys should be done with extraordinary care
Report of the NOAA Panel on Contingent Valuation, with Kenneth Arrow, Paul Portney, Roy Radner, Howard Schumann and Robert Solow, Federal Register, Friday, January 15, 1993, 4602-4614.