Category: Education
Designing robots to work with humans
Here is the good news:
Workers generally warm to collaborative robots quickly. Employees are keen to offload the “mindless, repetitive stuff”, as one roboticist puts it. And because workers themselves do the programming, they tend to regard the robots as subordinate assistants. This is good for morale, says Esben Ostergaard, UR’s technology chief. In late 2012 Mercedes-Benz began equipping workers who assemble gearboxes at a Stuttgart plant with lightweight “third hand” robots initially designed for use in space by the German Aerospace Centre. The German carmaker’s parent company, Daimler, is expanding the initiative, which it describes as “robot farming” because workers shepherd the robots “just like a farmer tending sheep”.
This is interesting too:
It turns out, for example, that people are more trusting of robots that use metaphors rather than abstract language, says Bilge Mutlu, the head of the robotics laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has found that robots are more persuasive when they refer to the opinions of humans and limit pauses to about a third of a second to avoid appearing confused. Robots’ gazes must also be carefully programmed lest a stare make someone uncomfortable. Timing eye contact for “intimacy regulation” is tricky, Dr Mutlu says, in part because gazes are also used in dialogue to seize and yield the floor.
When a person enters a room, robots inside should pause for a moment and acknowledge the newcomer, a sign of deference that puts people at ease, says the University of British Columbia’s Dr Croft. Robots also appear friendlier when their gaze follows a person’s moving hands, says Maya Cakmak of Willow Garage, the California-based maker of the PR2, a $400,000 robot skilled enough to make an omelette—albeit slowly.
This is more discomforting:
The world’s largest compiler of voluntary industrial standards, the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) in Geneva, has yet to work out safety standards for collaborative robots, such as how much force a robot can safely apply to different parts of a human worker’s body.
The story is interesting throughout, hat tip goes to FT Alphaville. By the way, humans prefer working with robots which sometimes make mistakes.
Chile fact of the day
…the average eighth grader in Ghana has a test score that would place her in the bottom 0.2 percent of US students. Even in considerably richer developing countries, the learning gap is large: the average Chilean student would be in the bottom 6.4 percent of US students, based on TIMSS scores.
That is from the Center for Global Development, via Charles Kenny, via Reihan, there is more here. By the way, here is the teacher response to recent educational reforms in Mexico.
South Koreans are turning more toward study in China
The number of South Koreans studying in China more than doubled to 62,855 in 2012 from 2003, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Education. The number of U.S.-bound students grew 50 percent to 73,351 in the same period.
Perhaps this has something to do with it:
Trade with China climbed an average 20 percent per year between 1992 and 2012, faster than the 6 percent growth with the U.S., according to Korea Customs Service. South Korea exported more to China than to the U.S. and European Union combined last year. China overtook the U.S. for South Korean foreign direct investment in the first quarter, the finance ministry said.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank KunLung Wu.
In equilibrium, they pay him to listen to their ads, or how to strike back at The Man
The bottom line is this:
Because he works from home, Mr Beaumont has been able to increase his revenue by keeping cold callers talking – asking for more details about their services.
And it works this way:
A man targeted by marketing companies is making money from cold calls with his own premium-rate phone number.
In November 2011 Lee Beaumont paid £10 plus VAT to set up his personal 0871 line – so to call him now costs 10p, from which he receives 7p.
The Leeds businessman told BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme that the premium line had so far made £300.
…Once he had set up the 0871 line, every time a bank, gas or electricity supplier asked him for his details online, he submitted it as his contact number.
He added he was “very honest” and the companies did ask why he had a premium number.
He told the programme he replied: “Because I’m getting annoyed with PPI phone calls when I’m trying to watch Coronation Street so I’d rather make 10p a minute.”
He said almost all of the companies he dealt with were happy to use it and if they refused he asked them to email.
The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank Michael Rosenwald.
President Obama’s new higher education plan
Here is one summary:
“Early Thursday, he released a plan that would:
- Create a new rating system for colleges in which they would be evaluated based on various outcomes (such as graduation rates and graduate earnings), on affordability and on access (measures such as the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants).
- Link student aid to these ratings, such that students who enroll at high performing colleges would receive larger Pell Grants and more favorable rates on student loans.
- Create a new program that would give colleges a “bonus” if they enroll large numbers of students eligible for Pell Grants.
- Toughen requirements on students receiving aid. For example, the president said that these rules might require completion of a certain percentage of classes to continue receiving aid.”
There is another summary here.
So far I don’t get it. There seems to be plenty of information about colleges, and I doubt if a federal rating system would improve on those ratings already privately available. To the extent that federal system became focal, the incentives to game and scheme it would become massive, and how or whether to punish the gamers, if and when they are caught, would be a political decision. I don’t see that as healthy.
Given that previous educational subsidies mostly are converted into higher rates of tuition and thus captured by the school, the second plank would simply boost the subsidy to high performing colleges. There are plenty of ways to do that and in any case it doesn’t seem to help today’s marginal students, who probably cannot do well in those environments in any case. Furthermore colleges with high graduate earnings are very often those located in or near high-paying cities. Should we be subsidizing on that basis? Should we be giving colleges an incentive to identify and deny admission to potential lower earners? Do we really want the federal government helping to crush humanities majors? And I don’t see that the kind of rating system under discussion here is measuring actual value added, ceteris paribus of course.
I am not opposed to tougher requirements for aid recipients, but again there is a danger of gaming. For instance the aid recipients might simply choose easier classes and majors and aid-hungry colleges might very well accommodate them and make things as easy as they need to.
On the third plank, I don’t think the problem is that Pell Grant recipients cannot get into a good enough college. The problem, insofar as there is one, relates to how well they do once they show up, given what is often inadequate preparation. Encouraging now-rejecting colleges to accept them will if anything lure them into environments they are not capable of handling.
I would find it helpful if this proposal would outline the core, underlying theory of market failure in higher education, and then how these ideas would fix it. It is difficult for me to put that argument together in my mind. I do get the intuitive reason why “aid should be tied to outcomes.” But presumably students, who already have by far the most at stake in choosing a college, already allocate their own dollars and aid dollars on the basis of outcomes. If that process isn’t broken, this plan seems to address a pseudo-problem. If that process is broken (misguided students?), we need to know whether this plan really will fix the kink in the system. For instance if students cannot right now choose the schools offering the best expected outcomes for them, this plan seems to work mighty hard to get the schools to do the choosing for them, but in reality only ends up putting the students into tougher and less appropriate institutions. Can you spell “remedial”? In any case, under these assumptions, it would seem to be the students who need the fixing, not the schools. And so on.
I do like this part:
Further, the administration is promising to issue “regulatory waivers” for “high-quality, low-cost innovations in higher education, such as making it possible for students to get financial aid based on how much they learn, rather than the amount of time they spend in class.”
Overall the ideas here strike me as underdeveloped in terms of logic. Perhaps the plan will have positive effects simply through the “bully pulpit” medium.
First lecture for International Trade
You don’t need to start early, but here is the first reading assignment for International Trade:
Bernhofen, Daniel and John C. Brown. 2005. “An Empirical Assessment of the Comparative Advantage Gains from Trade: Evidence from Japan.” American Economic Review.
Autor, David H. David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson. 2013. “Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets.” NBER Working Paper.
Acemoglu, Daron, David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. 2013. “Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s.” NBER Working Paper.
Feenstra, Robert C. 2008. “Offshoring in the Global Economy.” Ohlin Lecture Series, pp.1-47 only.
Grossman, Gene M. and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. 2006. “The Rise of Offshoring: It’s Not Wine for Cloth Anymore.” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Also watch the two videos on comparative advantage at MRUniversity.com, and the video Sources of Comparative Advantage, they are located in the class on development economics.
The Government Profits from Student Debt Defaults
Matt Taibbi’s expose of Federal educational loan programs is over-the-top and not balanced but it does have some shockers. Most importantly, according to Taibbi, the Federal government makes a profit on student defaults.
While it’s not commonly discussed on the Hill, the government actually stands to make an enormous profit on the president’s new federal student-loan system, an estimated $184 billion over 10 years, a boondoggle paid for by hyperinflated tuition costs and fueled by a government-sponsored predatory-lending program that makes even the most ruthless private credit-card company seem like a “Save the Panda” charity.
…In 2010, for instance, the Obama White House projected the default recovery rate for all forms of federal Stafford loans (one of the most common federally backed loans for undergraduates and graduates) to be above 122 percent. The most recent White House projection was slightly less aggressive, predicting a recovery rate of between 104 percent and 109 percent for Stafford loans.
The government claims the net after costs is less than 100%:
..Still, those recovery numbers are extremely high, compared with, say, credit-card debt, where recovery rates of 15 percent are not uncommon…. After the latest compromise, the 10-year revenue projection for the DOE’s lending programs is $184,715,000,000, or $715 million higher than the old projection – underscoring the fact that the latest deal, while perhaps rescuing students this coming year from high rates, still expects to ding them hard down the road.
The loans are profitable even when the student defaults because the government has ways of making people pay:
…”Student-loan debt collectors have power that would make a mobster envious” is how Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it. Collectors can garnish everything from wages to tax returns to Social Security payments to, yes, disability checks. Debtors can also be barred from the military, lose professional licenses and suffer other consequences no private lender could possibly throw at a borrower.
The upshot of all this is that the government can essentially lend without fear, because its strong-arm collection powers dictate that one way or another, the money will come back. Even a very high default rate may not dissuade the government from continuing to make mountains of credit available to naive young people.
The government has also made sure that many laws, such as the Truth in Lending law, do not apply to student loans.
Some student debt can make sense but when 40% of students drop out of college, when even the graduates do not graduate with the degrees that pay and when the job market is weak, student debt can be life-crippling:
…Bottomless credit equals inflated prices equals more money for colleges and universities, more hidden taxes for the government to collect and, perhaps most important, a bigger and more dangerous debt bomb on the backs of the adult working population.
What explains regional variation in health care spending?
It doesn’t seem to be demand side factors, but rather what doctors believe, including false beliefs. That is scary. There is a new NBER paper by David Cutler, Jonathan Skinner, Ariel Dora Stern, and David Wennberg and the abstract is this:
There is considerable controversy about the causes of regional variations in healthcare expenditures. We use vignettes from patient and physician surveys, linked to Medicare expenditures at the level of the Hospital Referral Region, to test whether patient demand-side factors, or physician supply-side factors, explains regional variations in Medicare spending. We find patient demand is relatively unimportant in explaining variations. Physician organizational factors (such as peer effects) matter, but the single most important factor is physician beliefs about treatment: 36 percent of end-of-life spending, and 17 percent of U.S. health care spending, are associated with physician beliefs unsupported by clinical evidence.
There is an earlier ungated version here (pdf).
Child labor during World War II
Many states had induced this crisis by suspending or relaxing their child labor laws, but even those still operative proved ineffective. By one estimate 900,000 children between twelve and eighteen were working in defiance of the law in their state. Philadelphia saw a decline of 13 percent in high school attendance,while in Oakland 15 percent of the children under sixteen had gone to work. Nothing demonstrated the failings of the educational system more than the irony that many of these kids earned more than their teachers did.
That is from the new Maury Klein book A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II.
How meritocratic are white Californians?
Specifically, he [Frank L. Samson] found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.
The white adults in the survey were also divided into two groups. Half were simply asked to assign the importance they thought various criteria should have in the admissions system of the University of California. The other half received a different prompt, one that noted that Asian Americans make up more than twice as many undergraduates proportionally in the UC system as they do in the population of the state.
When informed of that fact, the white adults favor a reduced role for grade and test scores in admissions — apparently based on high achievement levels by Asian-American applicants. (Nationally, Asian average total scores on the three parts of the SAT best white average scores by 1,641 to 1,578 this year.)
When asked about leadership as an admissions criterion, white ranking of the measure went up in importance when respondents were informed of the Asian success in University of California admissions.
Computers which magnify our prejudices
As AI spreads, this will become an increasingly important and controversial issue:
For one British university, what began as a time-saving exercise ended in disgrace when a computer model set up to streamline its admissions process exposed – and then exacerbated – gender and racial discrimination.
As detailed here in the British Medical Journal, staff at St George’s Hospital Medical School decided to write an algorithm that would automate the first round of its admissions process. The formulae used historical patterns in the characteristics of candidates whose applications were traditionally rejected to filter out new candidates whose profiles matched those of the least successful applicants.
By 1979 the list of candidates selected by the algorithms was a 90-95% match for those chosen by the selection panel, and in 1982 it was decided that the whole initial stage of the admissions process would be handled by the model. Candidates were assigned a score without their applications having passed a single human pair of eyes, and this score was used to determine whether or not they would be interviewed.
Quite aside from the obvious concerns that a student would have upon finding out a computer was rejecting their application, a more disturbing discovery was made. The admissions data that was used to define the model’s outputs showed bias against females and people with non-European-looking names.
The truth was discovered by two professors at St George’s, and the university co-operated fully with an inquiry by the Commission for Racial Equality, both taking steps to ensure the same would not happen again and contacting applicants who had been unfairly screened out, in some cases even offering them a place.
There is more here, and I thank the excellent Mark Thorson for the pointer.
Is “outside” overrated?
People are going to read this as a kind of #Slatepitch but as I live my life I see that despite all the talk about how great it is to be outside, people don’t really put their money where their mouth is. Property owners are much more likely to build an addition to their house (thereby increasing the inside/outside ratio of their property) when they’re feeling flush than to orchestrate a subtraction in order to get more open space. Even in places like Southern California where there’s really great weather all the time, the landscape is covered with buildings and people spend a very large sum of their income on purchasing or renting inside space in which to live over and above the inside space in which they work.
Here is much more, from Matt Yglesias, who explains why “inside” has “crucial advantages.” For a useful discussion on this matter I thank also Claire Hill.
The future of higher education in Alabama?
The video that was posted online appeared to be a tour of the spa area at some swanky new hotel.
There were cascading waterfalls into hot and cold pools. There was an arcade section. A smoothie bar. Flat-screen TVs adorned every open space. There were lockers the members at Augusta National would find acceptable.
This was luxury, no doubt. But it was not at a hotel.
Instead, this shaky video tour was of the inside of a college football team’s training and lounge area. Specifically, it is the training, weight room and lounge area within the Mal Moore Athletic Complex on the campus of the University of Alabama.
Pricetag: $9 million. (And that’s just for the upgrades. The original facility, which opened in 2005, cost about $50 million.)
The host school, the University of Alabama, raised tuition seven percent last year.
Great Economists class
We now have up all the videos and also the final exam for our class on The Great Economists. The class includes coverage of the entire Wealth of Nations, as well as a section on economic history, which covers the Bullionist debates, the Irish famine, the debt and sinking fund controversies, living standards in the Industrial Revolution, and other topics from economic history which influenced the classical economists.
You can find the iTunes downloads here.
Our next class will be International Trade and it will be available late August/very early September.
My International Trade reading list
Many people have been asking me for this. It’s not yet finished, but you can find the current version under the fold of this post. Suggestions for adding are of course welcome…
Books: Paul Krugman, Pop Internationalism, Geography and Trade, and Development, Geography, and Economic Theory. Dani Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes, and Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (on-line).
All videos can be found on MRUniversity.com, if not in the (forthcoming, in September) international trade section than in the development economics class or a few on Mexico in the Mexico class. In general I recommend viewing the videos before tackling the readings.
I. Comparative advantage and free trade
Bernhofen, Daniel and John C. Brown. 2005. “An Empirical Assessment of the Comparative Advantage Gains from Trade: Evidence from Japan.” American Economic Review.
Autor, David H. David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson. 2013. “Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets.” NBER Working Paper.
Acemoglu, Daron, David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. 2013. “Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s.” NBER Working Paper.
Goldberg, Pinelopi Koujianou and Nina Pavcnik. 2007. “Distributional Effects of Globalization in Developing Countries.” Journal of Economic Literature.
Videos: The two videos on Comparative Advantage, Sources of Comparative Advantage, Development and Trade, empirical evidence, Evidence on Comparative Advantage from Japan.
II.Free trade and tariffs
Paul Krugman. “The One-Minute Trade Policy Theorist.” (powerpoint)
Humphrey, Thomas M. 1987. “Classical and Neoclassical Roots of The Theory of Optimum Tariffs.” Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
Broda, Christian, Nuno Limao, and David Weinstein. 2008. “Optimal Tariffs and Market Power: The Evidence.” American Economic Review.
Arkolakis, Costas, Arnaud Costinot and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2012. “New Trade Models, Same Old Gains?” American Economic Review.
Kehoe, Timothy J. and Kim J. Kuhl. 2006. “How Important Is the New Goods Margin in International Trade?” NBER Working Paper.
Bernhofen, Daniel M., Zouheir El-Sahli, and RIchard Kneller. 2012. “Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade.” University of Nottingham Discussion Paper Series.
Nunn, Nathan and Daniel Trefler. 2010. “The Structure of Tariffs and Long-Term Growth.” American Economic Review.
Videos: Tariffs v. Quotas, International Trade Disciplines Monopolies, Effective rate of protection, Theory of Optimal Tariffs, Does “fair trade” help?, Malawi restrict trade in corn, Market reforms in Bangladesh, John Stuart Mill Terms of trade, The Shipping Container.
III. Heckscher-Ohlin and factor abundance theories of trade
Helpman, Elhanan. 1999. “The Structure of Foreign Trade.” Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Debaere, Peter. 2003. “Factor Abundance and Trade.” Journal of Political Economy.
Deardorff, Alan V. 1979. “Weak Links in the Chain of Comparative Advantage.” Journal of International Economics.
Trefler, Daniel. 1993. “International Factor Price Differences: Leontief Was Right!” Journal of Political Economy.
Davis, Donald R. and David E. Weinstein. 2001. “What Role for International Trade.” NBER Working Paper.
Davis, Donald R. 1995. “Intra-Industry Trade: A Heckscher-Ohlin-Ricardo Approach.” Journal of International Economics.
Deardorff, Alan V. 1982. “The General Validity of the Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem.” American Economic Review.
Videos: What is at Stake in Trade Theories?, The Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem, Evidence on the Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem.
IV. Increasing Returns
Donaldson, David. “Increasing Returns to Scale and Monopolistic Trade.” Powerpoint, on-line.
Helpman, Elhanan. 1987. “Imperfect Competition and International Trade: Evidence from Fourteen Industrial Countries.” Journal of the Japanese and International Economics.
Davis, Donald R. and David E. Weinstein. 2003. “Market Access, Economic Geography, and Comparative Advantage: An Empirical Test.” Journal of International Economics.
Baldwin, Richard and James Harrigan. 2010. “Zeros, Quality, and Space: Trade Theory and Trade Evidence.” NBER Working Paper.
Antweiler, Werner and Daniel Trefler. 2000. “Increasing Returns and All That: A View from Trade.” NBER Working Paper.
Debaere, Peter. 2005. “Monopolistic Competition and Trade, Revisited: Testing the Model Without Testing for Gravity.” Journal of International Economics.
Yi, Kei-Mu. 1999. “Can Vertical Specialization Explain the Growth of World Trade?” Journal of Political Economy.
Harrigan, James. 2001. “Specialization and the Volume of Trade: Do the Data Obey the Laws?” NBER Working Paper.
Bernard, Andrew B., J. Bradford Jensen, Stephen Redding, and Peter K. Schott. 2007. “Firms in International Trade.” NBER Working Paper.
Helpman, Elhanan. 2013. “Foreign Trade and Investment: Firm-Level Perspectives.” NBER Working Paper.
Tybout, James R. 2001. “Plant- and Firm-Level Evidence on “New” Trade Theories.” NBER Working Paper.
Bernard, Andrew B. and J. Bradford Jensen. 2004. “Why Some Firms Export.” Review of Economics and Statistics.
Videos: Trade and External Economies of Scale, Monopolistic Competition and International Trade, Trade and Increasing Returns: Evidence, Paul Romer, Robert Torrens on strategic trade policy, The Economics of Bollywood.
V. Gravity models
Anderson, James and Eric van Wincoop. 2004. “Trade Costs” Journal of Economic Literature.
Head, Keith. 2011. “Gravity for Beginners.” Presented at US-Canada Border Conference.
Hummels, David. 2007. “Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalization.” Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Deardorff, Alan V. 1998. “Determinants of Bilateral Trade: Does Gravity Work in a Neoclassical World?” NBER Working Paper.
Feenstra, Robert C., James R. Markusen, and Andrew K. Rose. 2001. “Using the Gravity Equation to Differentiate Among Alternative Theories of Trade.” The Canadian Journal of Economics.
Evenett, Simon J. and Wolfgang Keller. 1998. “On Theories Explaining the Success of the Gravity Equation.” NBER Working Paper.
Trefler, Daniel. 1995. “The Case of the Missing Trade and Other Mysteries.” American Economic Review.
Anderson, James and Eric van Wincoop. 2003. “Gravity with Gravitas: A Solution to the Border Puzzle.” American Economic Review.
Novy, Dennis. 2012. “Gravity Redux: Measuring International Trade Costs with Panel Data.” Economic Inquiry.
Eaton, Jonathan and Samuel Kortum. 2002. “Technology, Geography, and Trade.” Econometrica.
Donaldson, David. 2011. “Gravity Models.” No Journal—powerpoint.
Rossi-Hansberg, Esteban. 2005. “A Spatial Theory of Trade.” American Economic Review.
Chaney, Thomas. 2008. “Distorted Gravity: The Intensive and Extensive Margins of International Trade.” American Economic Review.
Anderson, James E. 1979. “A Theoretical Foundation for the Gravity Equation.” American Economic Review.
Video: The Gravity Equation and the Costs of Trade.
VI. Offshoring and factor prices
No Author. “Trade and Factor Prices” (powerpoint)
Feenstra, Robert C. 2008. “Offshoring in the Global Economy.” Ohlin Lecture Series.
Grossman, Gene M. and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. 2006. “The Rise of Offshoring: It’s Not Wine for Cloth Anymore.” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Grossman, Gene M. 2008. “Trading Tasks: A Simple Theory of Offshoring.” American Economic Review.
Donaldson, David. 2011. “Trade and Labor Markets.” powerpoint.
Khandelwal, Amit. 2009. “The Long and Short (of) Quality Ladders.” Review of Economic Studies.
Bernard, Andrew B., Stephen J Redding, and Peter K. Schott. 2012. “Testing the Factor Price Equality with Unobserved Differences in Factor Quality or Productivity.” U.S. Census Bureau Working Paper.
Baldwin, Richard. 2011. “How Trade and Industrial Organization After Globalization’s 2nd Unblundling: How Building and Joining a Supply Chain are Different and Why it Matters.” NBER Working Paper.
Videos: Factor price equalization, Specific Factors Models, Economics of Offshoring, The Rybczynski Theorem, Trade, Investment, and Migration as Substitutes, Unbundling the Supply Chain.
VI. Trade in economic history
Blecker, Robert A. 1997. “The ‘Unnatural and Retrograde Order’: Adam Smith’s Theories of Trade and Development Reconsidered.” Economica.
Irwin, Douglas. 2002. “Interpreting the Tariff-Growth Correlation of the Late Nineteenth Century.” American Economic Review.
Irwin, Douglas. 2002. “Did Import Substitution Promote Growth in the Late Nineteenth Century?” NBER Working Paper.
Clemens, Michael A. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2001. “A Tariff-Growth Paradox? Protection’s Impact on the World Around 1875-1997.” NBER Working Paper.
John Nye, “The Myth of Free Trade Britain and Fortress France,” Journal of Economic History, 1991.
Harrison, Ann and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2009. “Trade, Foreign Investment, and Industrial Policy for Developing Countries.” NBER Working Paper.
Irwin, Douglas. 1997. “From Smoot-Hawley to Reciprocal Agreements: Changing the Course of U.S. Trade Policy in the 1930s.” NBER Working Paper.
Irwin, Douglas. 1998. “The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment.” The Review of Economic Statistics.
Crowley, Meredith A. and Xi Luo. 2011. “Understanding the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-09 and the Subsequent Trade Recovery.” Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Gopinath, Gita and Oleg Itskhoki. 2009. “Trade Prices and the Global Trade Collapse of 2008-2009.” NBER Working Paper.
Francois, Joseph and Julia Woerz. 2009. “The Big Drop: Trade and the Great Recession.” No Journal, article online.
Videos: Corn Law debates, Friedrich List, Robert Torrens on sliding tariffs, The deindustrialization of India, Tariffs and Growth in the late 19th Century, South Korea and Industrial Policy, The Smoot-Hawley Tariff, Why Did Trade Plummet in the Great Recession?
VII. FDI and multinationals
Blonigen, Bruce A. 2005. “A Review of the Empirical Literature on FDI Determinants.” NBER Working Paper.
Ramondo, Natalia and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2009. “Trade, Multinational Production, and the Gains from Openness.” NBER Working Paper.
Antras, Pol and Stephen R. Yeaple. 2013. “Multinational Firms and the Structure of International Trade.” NBER Working Paper.
Videos: Basics of multinational corporations, Intra-firm Trade, Intra-industry Trade, Gains from Multinationals, Who Gains from FDI?, Productivity in firms, Foreign investment in India, Competition from foreign retailers, What is a Maquiladora? Introduction to NAFTA, NAFTA and Mexican Agriculture, The Effect of NAFTA on the Mexican Economy.
VIII. The politics of trade
Grossman, Gene M. and Elhanan Helpman. 1994. “Protection for Sale.” American Economic Review.
Goldberg, Pinelopi Koujianou and Giovanni Maggi. 1999. “Protection for Sale: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review.
Mayda, Anna Maria and Dani Rodrik. 2005. “What are Some People (and Countries) More Protectionist than Others?” European Economic Review.
Grossman, Gene M. and Elhanan Helpman. 1995. “The Politics of Free-Trade Agreements.” American Economic Review.
Harrison, Ann and Jason Scorse. 2010. “Multinational and Anti-Sweatshop Activism.” American Economic Review.
Videos: The Political Economy of Tariffs, Does Trade Help the Environment?, Regulation as a Major Trade Barrier, Who Supports Free Trade?, The Cultural Diversity Critique of Markets.