Vertical specialisation and gains from trade
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Multi‐stage production is a significant source of gains from trade in many recent quantitative trade models. Meanwhile, specialisation across stages of production, or ‘vertical specialisation’, has been largely ignored in these models. In this paper, I provide evidence that vertical specialisation is a salient feature in the international trade data, which suggests that standard models are inaccurate. I develop a model with multi‐stage production where country‐level productivity differences provide a basis for vertical specialisation and potentially new gains from trade. I then quantify the gains from vertical specialisation according to the model using data. Despite the evidence of vertical specialisation in the data, I find that the average gains from trade due to this channel are modest at less than 1% of GDP. These results suggest that, if vertical specialisation is an important source of gains from trade, then revealing these gains may require either more complex models, or more granular data, than are typically used in workhorse quantitative trade models.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it