Technology and Geography in the Second Industrial Revolution: New Evidence from the Margins of Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the Belle Époque, Belgium recorded an unprecedented trade boom, but growth in output per capita was lackluster.We seek to reconcile this ostensible paradox.Because of the sharp decline in both fixed and variable trade costs, the trade boom was as much about the expansion in the number of products delivered and markets served as it was about shipping more of the same old products.We use a new highly disaggregated data set on bilateral exports at the product level to illustrate these claims.In line with new trade theory, the effect of trade on productivity was mediated by sector-level firm heterogeneity and product differentiation.In new technology sectors, like tramways, the high degree of firm heterogeneity amplified the effect of trade on productivity.But in other sectors, mainly old staple industries like cotton textiles, a high level of firm uniformity muted the effect of trade.Into the twentieth century, old staples trumped new technology sectors, per capita income growing modestly as a result.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".