Paul Krugman has clarified the microeconomic underpinnings of both spatial economic agglomerations and regional imbalances at national and international levels. He has achieved this with a series of remarkably original papers and books that succeed in combining imperfect competition, increasing...

Krugman’s (1980) model of trade predicts that the country with the relatively large number of consumers is the net exporter and hosts a disproportionate share of firms in the increasing returns sector. He terms these results 'home market effects'. This Paper analyzes three additional models...

Market size and transport costs are important ingredients of international trade. We propose to look at these issues from a different perspective. Using a Hotelling duopoly model with quadratic transport costs, we analyse the welfare effects of international trade between two countries that...

Incorporating space in economic models has two important consequences. First, the hypothesis of perfect competition becomes untenable, and second, the distinction between private and public goods becomes blurred. We review arguments that lead to these conclusions and summarize recent work...

We study the relationship between competition and quality within a spatial competition framework where firms compete in prices and quality. We generalise existing literature on spatial price-quality competition along several dimensions, including utility functions that are non-linear in income...

We propose a dynamic model of an oligopoly industry characterized by spatial competition between multi-store retailers. Firms compete in prices and decide where to open or close stores depending on demand conditions and the number of competitors at different locations, and on location-specific...

We survey the recent empirical literature on structural models of market entry and spatial competition in oligopoly retail industries. We start with the description of a framework that encompasses various models that have been estimated in empirical applications. We use this framework to discuss...

Using a spatial competition framework with three ex ante identical firms, we study the effects of a horizontal merger on quality, price and welfare. The merging firms always reduce quality. They also increase prices if demand responsiveness to quality is sufficiently low. The non-merging firm,...

Recent events, historical evidence and geographical proximity suggest that the six EFTAns and twelve Central and East European countries (CEECs) are natural trading partners. This paper evaluates this suggestion by estimating the potential for EFTA-CEEC trade using the gravity model of Wang and...

This paper fits a gravity model to the trade of 76 market economies. It then applies the model to data on East European economies to estimate what their trading potential might have been, had behaved like market economies in the mid-1980s. At existing levels of national income, the...