| In one way or another, each of these essays assesses conventional wisdom on a topic of relevance to economists and business scholars.;The first chapter, written with David E. Weinstein, examines the extent to which factor endowments explain production patterns. Under the factor-abundance model of trade, production patterns are indeterminate if there are more goods than factors. However, the usual practice of economists is to assume that the world behaves "as if" production were approximately determinate. Our results strongly refute this assumption. Endowments offer little guidance in forecasting outputs, especially where transactions costs are likely to be low: e.g., for tradable goods and for regional data. These findings imply that a popular way of measuring trade barriers--using residuals from regressions of trade on factor endowments--is fundamentally flawed.;The second chapter uses a sample of large Japanese firms to document patterns of export behavior and to probe the relationship between exports and productivity. It considers two competing conventional wisdoms. One asserts that export participation raised firm-level productivity growth. The second maintains that the act of exporting conveyed no benefit in terms of higher productivity; the superior performance of exporters relative to nonexporters merely reflects self-selection into export markets. I test these two views, using a variety of techniques and a productivity measure superior to those employed in previous studies. My results support the latter view, corroborating several plant-level studies on other countries.;The third chapter, previously published but reprinted here with some additional remarks, is a case study of the 7-Eleven convenience-store chain. It challenges two pieces of conventional wisdom. First is the belief that U.S. companies are strong and Japanese ones weak in retailing. Instead, divergent firm capabilities and differences in market environments explain 7-Eleven's superior performance in Japan. Second is the notion that U.S. firms are more innovative than and more resourceful in utilizing information technology than their Japanese counterparts. Seven-Eleven Japan was no less creative than Southland, its U.S. counterpart, although the type of innovation it pursued was qualitatively different. Moreover, Seven-Eleven Japan exhibited far greater ambition and ingenuity in utilizing information technology than did Southland. |
