Young Chin Kim, The Cross-Sectional, Inter-Industry Structure of Capital Utilization in a Developing Economy: The Case of S. Korean Manufacturing, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Feb., 1982), pp. 84-89

T HE concept of the capital-output ratio has played an almost indispensable part in economic planning in underdeveloped countries, notwithstanding numerous theoretical objections. The range of areas in which the concept is brought into play stretches from judgement-free projections of capital requirements and of future growth rates to the wise man's role of setting an acceptable target rate of growth and of selecting investment criteria. However, progress has been seriously hampered partly because the available empirical evidence has been very limited in the coverage of various countries and also in the level of sectoral disaggregation.' In the present paper, we make use of certain new data whose analysis seems to suggest that the conventional notion of relative factor-endowments and choice of production techniques needs to be re-examined. The main objectives of this study are two: first, we present a comprehensive statistical analysis of detailed sectoral output-capital ratios for a large number of countries. Second, in doing so, this paper will point to a surprising characteristic of present-day economic underdevelopment. This evidence has a significant bearing on a number of related topics.

Since the term structure of interest rates embodies information about future economic activity, we extract relative Nelson-Siegel (1987) factors from cross-country yield curve differences to proxy expected movements in future exchange rate fundamentals. Using monthly data for the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and the United States, we show that the yield curve factors predict exchange rate movements and explain excess currency returns one month to two years ahead. Our results provide support for the asset pricing formulation of exchange rate determination and offer an intuitive explanation to the uncovered interest parity puzzle by relating currency risk premiums to inflation and business cycle risks.

Research on the effect of language skills on earnings is complicated by the endogeneity of language skills. This study exploits the phenomenon that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to construct an instrumental variable for language proficiency. We find a significant positive effect of English proficiency on wages among adults who immigrated to the United States as children. Much of this effect appears to be mediated through education. Differences between non-English-speaking origin countries and English-speaking ones that might make immigrants from the latter a poor control group for nonlanguage age-at-arrival effects do not appear to drive these findings.

Using a large, individual-level wage data set, we examine the impact of a major technological innovation—the steam engine—on the demand for skills in the merchant shipping industry. We find that the technical change created a new demand for engineers, a skilled occupation. It had a deskilling effect on production work—moderately skilled able-bodied seamen were replaced by unskilled engine room operatives. On the other hand, able-bodied seamen, carpenters, and mates employed on steam vessels earned a premium relative to their counterparts on sail vessels, and this appears partly related to skill.

We propose a Cramér–von Mises–type test for testing whether the mean potential outcome given a specific treatment level has a weakly monotonic relationship with the continuous treatment under unconfoundedness. To flexibly control for a possibly high-dimensional set of covariates, our test is based on a double debiased machine learning method. We show that our test controls asymptotic size and is consistent against any fixed alternative. We apply our test to evaluate the Job Corps program and reject a weakly negative relationship between the treatment (hours in academic and vocational training) and labor market performance among relatively low treatment values.