| This thesis consists of two chapters. The first chapter studies the role of barriers to trade in determining the allocation of productive factors in Peruvian agriculture. I develop, estimate and simulate a general equilibrium model of intra-national trade; then I use the quantitative model to perform counterfactuals that show the productivity and income gains for farmers from better integration to urban markets. The second chapter derives from joint work with Jonathan Eaton and Samuel Kortum. First, I explain how to implement a Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimator based on the multinomial distribution, using tools available in standard econometric packages. Second, I compare it with the Poisson PML estimator, currently popular in the estimation of gravity regressions in trade, and show that these estimators differ in how they weigh each observation in the computation of the score. |
