This Paper presents a model of international trade that features heterogeneous firms, relative endowment differences across countries, and consumer taste for variety. The Paper demonstrates that firm reactions to trade liberalization generate endogenous Ricardian productivity responses at the...

Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

This paper formulates a structural empirical model of heterogeneous firms whose workers exhibit fair-wage preferences. In the underlying theoretical framework, such preferences lead to a link between a firm's operating profits on the one hand and wages of workers employed by this firm on the...

Peaks and troughs in the spatial distributions of population, employment and wealth are a universal phenomenon in search of a general theory. Such spatial imbalances have two possible explanations. In the first, uneven economic development can be seen as the result of the uneven distribution of...

This paper investigates the impacts of progressive trade openness, technological externalities, and heterogeneity of individuals on the formation of entrepreneurship in a two-country occupation choice model. We show that trade opening gives rise to a non-monotonic process of international...

We study the impact of falling trade costs and falling national transport costs on the economic geography of countries involved in an integration process. Two regions between which labour is mobile form each country, but there is no international factor mobility. Commodities can be traded both...

The aim of this paper is to qualify the claim that regulating a competitive transport sector is always detrimental to consumers. We show indeed that, although transport deregulation is beneficial to consumers as long as the location of economic activity is fixed, this is no longer true when, in...

We consider an economic geography model in which all firms and workers are mobile, but the agglomeration of firms and workers within a region generates urban costs. We show that industries with high transport costs tend to be more agglomerated than industries with low transport costs. This is to...

We investigate whether an aging population may challenge the supremacy of large working-cities. To this end, we develop an economic geography model with two types of individuals (workers and retirees) and two sectors (local services and manufacturing). Workers produce and consume; the elderly...

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...