Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

Over the past four decades merchandise trade of developing Asian economies (DAEs) has grown at a much faster rate than growth in world trade, with a distinct intra-regional bias. Global production sharing has become a unique feature of the region's economic landscape, with China playing a...

Stephen Hymer (1960, 1976) argues that a desire to increase market power is a strong motive for foreign takeovers. Yet the market-power motive for FDI flows has been largely unexplored in the modern theory of heterogeneous firms. This paper shows that foreign direct investment can increase...

We characterize how firms select between alternative ways of serving a market. ``First-order" selection effects, whether firms enter or not, are extremely robust. "Second-order" ones, how firms serve a market conditional on entry, are less so: more efficient firms will select into the entry mode...

In the face of trade liberalization domestic firms are often forced out of the market, whereas others adapt and survive. In this paper we focus on a new channel of adaptation, namely the shift toward increased provision of services in lieu of goods production. We exploit variation in EU trade...

We formulate a two-country model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms to reconsider labor market linkages in open economies. Labor-market imperfections arise by virtue of country-specific real minimum wages. Two principal experiments are considered. First, we show that trade...

This paper analyses tax competition between two countries of unequal size trying to attract a foreign-owned monopolist. When regional governments have only a lump-sum profit tax (subsidy) at their disposal, but face exogenous and identical transport costs for imports, then both countries will...

We formulate a two-country model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms to reconsider labor market linkages in open economies. Labor-market imperfections arise by virtue of country-specific real minimum wages. Two principal experiments are considered. First, we show that trade...

This Paper extends the theory of multinational corporations, identifying three distinct influences of internal trade liberalization by a group of countries on the level and pattern of inward foreign direct investment (FDI). First, the tariff-jumping motive encourages plant consolidation. Second,...

This paper argues that interests of nationals and owners of home-based foreign capital in the formation of a Trade Agreements (TA) are not antagonistic, except under rather particular assumptions on initial tariffs among potential members. Further, if initial tariffs are endogenously determined...