Keith Head

Co-editor, Canadian Journal of Economics

The Cabecao Blog

Teaching

January to May: COMM498 International Business

Online access to my book, Elements of Multinational Strategy

Research

Curriculum Vitae in PDF (Updated April 23, 2008, publication record begins on page 13)

Publications

• "Detection of local interactions from the spatial pattern of names in France" (with Thierry Mayer) Journal of Regional Science 2008.
• "FDI as an Outcome of the Market for Corporate Control: Theory and Evidence" (with John Ries) Journal of International Economics 2008.
• "The Puzzling Persistence of the Distance Effect on Bilateral Trade" (with Anne-Celia Disdier), Review of Economics and Statistics 2008. also TARGET Working Paper No. 28, paper formerly titled "Exaggerated Reports of the Death of Distance: Lessons from a Meta-analysis" (we had to change the title because too many other papers were alluding to the same Mark Twain quip).
• ""Regional Wage and Employment Responses to Market Potential in the EU" (with Thierry Mayer) Regional Science and Urban Economics 36(5), 573-595, September 2006.
• "Judging Japan's FDI: The verdict from a dartboard model" (with John Ries) Journal of the Japanese and International Economies 19 (2005) 215-232.
• "Market Potential and the Location of Japanese Investment in Europe." (with Thierry Mayer) Review of Economics and Statistics 86(4), 959-972, November, 2004.
• "Exporting and FDI as Alternative Strategies," (with John Ries) Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Autumn 2004 .
• "Regionalism within Multilateralism: The WTO Trade Policy Review of Canada," (with John Ries) The World Economy, 2004 .
• "Vertical Networks and U.S. Auto Parts Exports: Is Japan Different?" (with John Ries, Barbara Spencer). Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 2004.
• The Empirics of Agglomeration and Trade (with Thierry Mayer) North-Holland Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics 2004.
• "Heterogeneity and the FDI versus Export Decision of Japanese Manufacturers" (with John Ries), Journal of the Japanese and International Economies , 2003.
• "Estimating the Knowledge Capital Model of the Multinational Enterprise: Comment," (with Bruce Blonigen and Ron Davies) American Economic Review 93(3), pp. 980-994, June 2003.
• "Offshore Production and Skill Upgrading by Japanese Manufacturing Firms." (with John Ries) Journal of International Economics 2002.
• "Revisiting Oligopolistic Reaction: Are FDI Decisions Strategic Complements?" (with Thierry Mayer and John Ries) Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, 2002.
• "On the Pervasiveness of Home Market Effects" (with Thierry Mayer and John Ries) Economica 2002.
• "Increasing Returns Versus National Product Differentiation as an Explanation for the Pattern of US-Canada Trade," (with John Ries) American Economic Review 2001.
• "Overseas Investment and Firm Exports," Review of International Economics, (with John Ries) 2001.
• "Non-Europe: The Magnitude and Causes of Market Fragmentation in Europe," (with Thierry Mayer) Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv 136(2):285--314, 2000.
• "Infant industry protection in the steel rail industry," Journal of International Economics Volume 37, Issues 3-4 , November 1994, Pages 141-165.

Working papers

• "How remote is the offshoring threat?" (with Thierry Mayer and John Ries), CEPR DP 6542.
• "Exposure to foreign media and changes in cultural traits: Evidence from naming patterns in France" (with Thierry Mayer and Anne-Celia Disdier) CEPR DP 5674
• "Illusory Border Effects," (with Thierry Mayer) available as an CEPII Working Paper
• "Skewed and Extreme: Useful distributions for economic heterogeneity" (this is really rough and incomplete, a work-in-progress albeit not making much progress, I put it up here mainly because some of the distribution properties may be helpful)

Advice on doing research

• The introduction "formula" (adapted from advice John Ries and I received from Jim Brander)
• How do I write a scientific paper? (Almost all of this advice applies to economics papers as well)
• Don Davis on picking a research topic. I particularly like the following advice Don gives: "...you would like to have your empirical work place some intellectual capital on the line . What views of the world will we affirm or abandon (strengthen or weaken) on the basis of your empirical work? If you do not have an answer to this, then the empirical work will not be very exciting." (italics added)
• The 10 Commandments for Regression Tables
• The 10 Commandments for Figures
• Do you hate doing math in Powerpoint? Wish you could port your LaTeX straight into a PDF presentation, while retaining the clickable items, colors of PPT? Try .
• Is there an objective criterion one can use for eliminating outliers from a single series? The whole practice of eliminating outliers is frowned upon by many. However, if you have a good reason to do so, it makes sense to follow an objective and replicable procedure: I have used the Grubbs test which can be implemented in Stata using this Stata .ado file (Anne Celia Disdier and I wrote the code. Let me know if you find bugs).
• Things I hate. There is far too much hate in the world so I really should not be adding to it. So feel free to not click on this link--UNLESS you happening to be submitting a trade paper to the Canadian Journal of Economics...

Contact Information

Office: Henry Angus 268	Mailing Address:
Tel: (604) 822-8492	Sauder School of Business, UBC
Fax: (604) 822-8477	2053 Main Mall
E-mail: keith dot head at ubc dot ca	Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z2
	Canada

Life elsewhere

How I got here

Here is my position in the "family tree" of international trade economists.

Quotes

"when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." (Lord Kelvin)

There is many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip. (Hazlitt: English Proverbs.)

"There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense on paper, on a tape recorder in evidence. And there are facts because nothing makes any sense otherwise." (Raymond Chandler: Playback)

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." (Thomas Edison)