Dynamic Comparative Advantage in International Shipbuilding: The Transition from Wood to Steel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Can temporary initial input cost advantages have a long-run impact on the spatial distribution of production and trade? I study this question in the context of the international shipbuilding industry during the transition from wood to metal ship production (1850-1912). Input price advantages gave Britain an early lead in metal shipbuilding, while the U.S. and Canada specialized in wood ship production. However, after 1890, Britain's initial price advantages disappeared. By comparing production patterns on the Atlantic Coast of North America, which faced British competition, to the Great Lakes, which were isolated from competition, I show that British competition substantially reduced the ability of North American producers to transition to metal ship production. I also exploit additional sources of variation to show how government protection and support moderated these effects for some Atlantic Coast producers, allowing them to survive the demise of wood shipbuilding. Finally, I provide evidence that the mechanism driving the persistence of Britain's lead was the development of large pools of skilled craft workers. These results shed light on the role of past conditions in influencing current production and trade patterns and with implications for the use of industrial policy and tariff protection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".