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 analyze the welfare effects of international trade between two countries which...

We investigate how differences in set-up costs of various types affect the trade-off between global effciency and spatial equity and show that the standard assumption of symmetry in fixed costs masks the existence of an interesting effect: the range of available varieties varies depends on the...

We consider an economic geography model of a new genre: all firms and workers are mobile and their agglomeration within a city generates rising urban costs through competition on a land market. When commuting costs are low (high), the industry tends to be agglomerated (dispersed). With two...

We develop a model of capital tax competition in which imperfectly competitive firms choose both the number of plants they operate and their location. When compared to models with single-plant firms, the presence of multinationals reverses some standard results. First, instead of being...

We present a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with variable demand elasticities and investigate the impact of free trade on welfare and efficiency. First, contrary to the constant elasticity case, in which all gains from trade are due to increasing product diversity, our...

We investigate the spatial distribution and organization of an imperfectly competitive industry when firms may choose to operate more than a single production unit. Focusing on a short-run setting with a fixed mass of firms, we fully characterize the spatial equilibria analytically. Comparing...

There is a wide consensus among international institutions and national governments in favor of compact (i.e. densely populated) cities as a way to improve the ecological performance of the transport system. Indeed, when both the intercity and intra-urban distributions of activities are given, a...

We analyze how the interplay between urban costs, wage wedges, and trade costs may affect the interregional location of firms as well as the intraurban location, within the central business district or in a secondary employment center (SEC) of the selected region. In this way, we investigate, on...

This paper explores the interplay between commodities’ transportation costs and workers’ commuting costs within a general equilibrium framework `a la Dixit-Stiglitz. Workers are mobile and choose a region where to work as well as an intraurban location where to live. We show that a more...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization when monopolistically competitive and oligopolistic firms coexist in the same market. The model is characterized by a group of multi-product firms which behave strategically and take their impact on market aggregates into account (e.g. the...