NBER Publications by Leo Sveikauskas

Recent theoretical developments have cast doubt on the reliability of the commonly used cross-industry regression as a method for inferring a country's abundant factors. This paper examines the empirical importance of these theoretical cautions by comparing regression derived estimates of factor abundance with both revealed and actual factor abundances for thirty-five countries and up to twelve resources. Trade imbalances are found to importantly affect the regression estimates and we therefore derive and implement a theoretically consistent trade balance correction. The results indicate that despite theoretical concerns, the regression measures are often reliable indicators of revealed factor abundances. The results therefore enhance the credibility of the findings of the numero...

This paper presents conceptually correct tests of the Heckscher-Ohlin proposition that trade in commodities can be explained in terms of an interaction between factor input requirements and factor endowments. Most prior work that claims top resent tests of this hypothesis have used intuitive but inappropriate generalizations of the traditional two by two model to deal with a multidimensional reality. Moreover, prior work has in general used measurements on only two of the three variables(trade, factor input requirements and factor endowments) that are required for a proper test of the H-O theory.We derive an exact specification of the H-O interaction in a multicountry, multicommodity, multifactor world in the form of the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (H-O-V) theorem which equates the factors embod...