We visit the role of privatization in the location decision of firms in an industry where no firm can produce all varieties demanded. We demonstrate that the Nash equilibrium locations are socially optimal, in the presence of a publicly owned firm, notwithstanding the degree of privatization.

When firms cluster in the same local labour market, they face a trade-off between the benefits of labour pooling (i.e., access to workers whose knowledge helps reduce costs) and the costs of labour poaching (i.e., loss of some key workers to competition and the indirect effect of a higher wage...

We re-examine the economic justification for the regulation of firms' spatial price policies. Existing analysis, by treating market structure as exogenous, loses an important trade-off. Discriminatory pricing is more competitive between incumbents but acts as a strong deterrent against entry....

In linear-city models, if firms are allowed (not allowed) to locate outside the linear city, they engage in excessive (insufficient) R&D investments from the normative viewpoint. This implies that the feasible set of locations drastically affects their investments.

The purpose of this paper is to show that taste heterogeneity and imperfect information on the characteristics of available varieties among consumers can lead to the agglomeration of commercial activities. Here, the source of agglomeration is matching. By constructing a two-region model, we show...

Recent surges of China's outward FDI feature four stylized facts: China's OFDI is predominately conducted by state owned or state controlled enterprises (SOEs); a large proportion of such OFDI takes the form of cross-border M&A; most of the target firms are failing firms, which lead to poor...

We set-up a linear city model with duopoly upstream and downstream. Consumers have a transportation cost when buying from a retailer, and retailers have a transportation cost when buying from a wholesaler. We characterize the equilibria in a five-stage game where location and pricing decisions...

This Paper focuses on two distinct facets of globalization: the decrease in the trade costs of goods and the decline of communication costs between headquarters and production facilities within firms. When the unskilled have about the same wage in the two regions, the decrease of these costs...

Increasing returns in matching between skilled workers and firms create a local thick-market externality when labour markets are geographically segmented. This generates an agglomeration force that can offset the dispersion force due to local competition in a segmented product market. When this...

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we present a model of agglomeration and trade that displays the main features of the recent economic geography literature, while allowing for the derivation of analytical results by means of simple algebra. Second, we show how this framework can be...