Essays on macroeconomics and international trade

This thesis focuses on the study of different aspects of income inequality across and within countries. In the first chapter, I study how the optimal provision of human capital is distorted in the presence of borrowing constraints and private information on talent and wealth. It shows that elitist, non-merit based, access to higher education can be constrained optimal in poor and unequal countries. The second chapter documents how the IT revolution has changed the patterns of North-South trade and analyzes its effects on wage inequality. It provides theoretical and empirical results on wage polarization and a changes in the pattern of specialization. Finally, the third chapter provides a framework for estimating technological diffusion across countries. The framework is applied to study the diffusion of major technologies across the world since the Industrial Revolution. It is shown that differences in technology diffusion in the last two hundred years can account for two thirds of current income per capita differences.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Mestieri, Martí (Mestieri Ferre)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daron Acemoglu, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Robert M. Townsend.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/65489

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/65489