I present a trade model featuring North-South differences in demand for quality and in quality of task supply.  The model explains a number of stylised facts: Southern firms charge higher factory-gate prices for their products in rich than in poor, and in distant than in near markets.  The...

We introduce two new tools for relating preferences and demand to firm behavior and economic performance.  The "Demand Manifold" links the elasticity and convexity of an arbitrary demand function; the "Utility Manifold" links the elasticity and concavity of an arbitrary utility function. ...

We provide a general characterization of which firms will select alternative ways of serving a market.  If and only if firms' maximum profits are supermodular in production and market-access costs, more efficient firms will select into the activity with lower market-access costs.  Our result...

This paper discusses the place of oligopoly in international trade theory, and argues that it is unsatisfactory to ignore firms altogether, as in perfectly competitive models, or to view large firms as more productive clones of small ones, as in monopolistically competitive models.  Doing...

This paper reviews the scientific contributions of Paul Krugman to the study of international trade, on the occasion of his receipt of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.  A simplified exposition is presented of some of his principal findings, including: the effects of trade on firm...

This paper analyses the implications of bargaining between buyers and sellers on the competitive outcome in a homogeneous good industry. Bargaining creates a competitive equilibrium in which some inefficient sellers coexist with efficient ones leading to productivity dispersion. Rival cost...

We show that the efficient allocation of production capacity can turn a competitive industry and downstream market into an imperfectly competitive one. Even though downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, the downstream industry structure will be symmmetric only if capacity is...

This paper tests whether manufacturing exports pay more to educated workers in an effort to ascertain whether the productivity of human capital is raised by exports. Using a panel of matched employer-employee data from Morocco, we fail to find convincing evidence that exporters pay more to...

We present a new model of multi-product firms (MPFs) and flexible manufacturing and explore its implications in partial and general equilibrium. International trade integration affects the scale and scope of MPFs through a competition effect and a demand effect. We demonstrate how MPFs adjust in...

The impact of imports from low-wage countries on domestic labor market outcomes has been a hotly debated issue for decades.  The recent surge in imports from China has reignited this debate.  Since the 1980s several developed economies have experienced contemporaneous increases in the volume...