Free trade in audio-visual services has faced opposition on the grounds that foreign media undermine domestic culture, and ultimately, global diversity. We assess the media-culture link using name frequencies as a measure of tastes. Using a 47-year panel of French birth registries, we first show...

This paper studies the relationship between bilateral trade patterns and opinions. It uses the Eurobarometer public opinion surveys published by the European Commission, which provide data on the share of the population in each EU member country in favour of each CEEC joining the EU. Our results...

This paper examines empirical strategies that have been or could be used to evaluate the importance of agglomeration and trade models. This theoretical approach, widely known as ‘New Economic Geography’ (NEG), emphasizes the interaction between transport costs and firm-level scale economies...

Investigations of the effect of quality differences on heterogeneous performance in exporting have been limited by lack of direct measures of quality. We examine exports of French wine, matching the exporting firms to producer ratings from two wine guides. We show that high quality producers...

Knickerbocker (1973) introduced ‘oligopolistic reaction’ to explain why firms follow rivals into foreign markets. We develop a model that incorporates central features of Knickerbocker's story-oligopoly, uncertainty, and risk aversion-to establish the conditions required to generate...

The majority of independent nations today were part of empires in 1945. Using bilateral trade data from 1948 to 2006, we examine the effect of independence on post-colonial trade. On average, there is little short run effect of trade with the colonizer (metropole). However, after three decades...

Recent theoretical work on economic geography emphasizes the interplay of transport costs and plant-level increasing returns. In these models, the spatial distribution of demand is a key determinant of economic outcomes. In one strand, it is argued that higher demand gives rise to a more than...

Using data on name distributions in 95 French departments observed from 1946 to 2002, we investigate spatial and social mechanisms behind the transmission of parental preferences. Drawing inspiration from recent work on social interactions, we develop a simple discrete choice model that predicts...

With increasing sophistication, economists have been estimating gravity equations for five decades. Robust evidence shows that borders and distance impede trade by much more than tariffs or transports costs can explain. We therefore advocate investigation of other sources of resistance, despite...

We investigate the hypothesis that firms prefer to locate ``where the markets are." We use a theoretical model of location choice under imperfect competition to formalise this concept. The model yields an equilibrium profit equation incorporating a term closely connected to the market potential...