This Paper investigates the welfare effects of trade liberalization by exploiting a natural policy experiment in the small open economy of Cyprus. A 1993 law relaxed import restrictions on used vehicles and facilitated the flow of used Japanese vehicles into the country. This led to a dramatic...

This paper develops a simple model of international trade with intermediation. We consider an economy with two islands and two types of agents, farmers and traders. Farmers can produce two goods, but in order to sell these goods in centralized (Walrasian) markets, they need to be matched with a...

The fiscal gains from, and hence the political incentives for, an increase in the inflation rate of ten percentage points may be substantial: Swedish data from 1994 suggests an annual real flow of 3–4% of GDP, or a capitalized value of nearly 100% of GDP. These gains would have arisen mainly...

The incorporation of details of industrial organisation into the study of international trade has been the subject of a fast growing recent literature which is surveyed in this paper. Whereas the conventional theory of trade deals almost exclusively with perfect competition and non-increasing...

This Paper introduces the concepts of direct and indirect factor trade utility functions and uses them to derive Marshallian and Hicksian factor content functions, which express the quantities of factors embodied in net exports as a function of the economy's factor prices and endowments. The...

In models with heterogeneous firms trade integration has a positive impact on aggregate productivity through the selection of the best firms as import competition drives the least productive ones out of the market. To quantify the impact of firm selection on productivity, we calibrate and...

The paper examines the welfare gains from North-South trade and their distribution. We construct an endogenous growth North-South model with four Southern stages of development as possible equilibria: specialisation in a traditional good; the South in addition copies Northern high-tech...

We present a method for identifying and estimating the gains from trade in limit order markets and provide new empirical evidence that the limit order market is a good market design. The gains from trade in our model arise because traders have different valuations for the stock. We use...

A firm's productivity depends on how production is organized given the level of demand for its product. To capture this mechanism, we develop a theory of an economy where firms with heterogeneous demands use labor and knowledge to produce. Entrepreneurs decide the number of layers of management...