This paper examines optimal policy towards a home exporting firm which competes on price with a foreign firm. Two policy instruments are compared: an output subsidy and a price subsidy. The paper also considers two games: the conventional ex ante game, in which the government sets the value of...

This paper investigates the interaction of firms' financial structure and their competitive behaviour on oligopolistic product markets. We consider risk-averse entrepreneurs who produce with uncertain production costs. To reduce their exposure to risk they can sell stocks to risk-neutral...

The British electricity supply industry has, with the exception of Nuclear Electric, now been privatized. Bulk supplies of electricity are traded between two dominant generators and many suppliers in an unregulated `pool'. The generators submit a supply schedule of prices for each generating set...

In this paper, we consider a European industry characterized by vertical product differentiation. Using a two-stage model with quality choice made before price competition takes place, we show that EU anti-dumping policy that takes the form of price-undertakings offers a powerful protection to...

We provide a method allowing to identify margins in an oligopoly price competition game when prices may not be freely chosen in some markets, for example due to regulation. We use our identification strategy to study the effects of regulatory constraints in the pharmaceutical industry, which is...

Although naive intuition may indicate the opposite, the existing literature suggests that uncertainty about costs in the homogeneous-good Bertrand model intensifies competition: it lowers price and raises total surplus (but also makes profits go up). Those results, however, are derived under two...

In this paper, we adopt the vertical differentiation duopoly framework to give a full description of firms’ relocation decisions, when the removal either of trade barriers or of restrictions on capital outflows/inflows (‘globalization’) allows them to serve the domestic market through...

We study patterns of FDI in a multi-country world economy. First, we present evidence for a broad sample of countries that firms direct FDI disproportionately to markets with income levels similar to their home market. Then we develop a model featuring non-homothetic preferences for quality and...

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition and derive a complete characterization of the market equilibrium based on an Arrow-Pratt measure of concavity of the utility, interpreted as the relative love for variety. When the relative love for variety increases with the consumption...

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...