The first essay develops and tests a monopolistic competition model with a more general, but still tractable, CES preference structure that nests Krugman (1980) and Armington (1969) style models. With limited love of variety the consumer faces a trade-off between buying more varieties or higher...

We examine a generalized version of Flam and Helpmanacirc;euro;TMs (1987) model of vertical differentiation that maps cross-country differences in income distributions to variations in import variety and price distributions. The theoretical predictions are examined and confirmed using micro data...