We introduce a simple oligopolistic trade model with international transportation costs, and analyze the profitability and the social desirability of national vs. international mergers in relation to three different issues, (i) the level of trade freeness, (ii) the possibility of rent...

We analyze an oligopolistic market where a domestic and a foreign firm are engaged in a takeover battle for a domestic competitor. Any merger or acquisition (M&A) must be approved by a welfare maximizing domestic competition agency which may or may not be prone to "economic patriotism". A...

We investigate empirically how sellers react to changes in the population of their consumers, identifying the effects of demand composition and demand size with limited information on costs. We show how pharmacists in Italy selectively increase the price of some products when they observe in...

A structural model of entry and fiscal policy is presented. It shows that taxation of variable production costs can increase product prices, lower competition, and reduce the availability of new products in small markets. The model’s test is based on a unique nationwide fiscal experiment. We...

We consider a three-stage game to examine how market integration affects firms’ incentives to provide general worker training. In stage 1, firms invest in productivity-enhancing training. In stage 2, they can make wage offers for each others’ workers. Finally, Cournot competition takes...

The core-periphery model by Krugman (1991) has two 'dramatic' implications: catastrophic agglomeration and locational hysteresis. We study this seminal model with CES instead of Cobb-Douglas upper tier preferences. This small generalization suffices to change these stark implications. For a wide...

We develop a new general equilibrium model of trade with heterogeneous firms, variable demand elasticities and endogenously determined wages. Trade integration favors wage convergence, intensifies competition, and forces the least efficient firms to leave the market, thereby affecting aggregate...

We develop a model with two asymmetric countries. Firms choose the number and the location of plants that they operate. The production of each firm increases when trade costs fall. The fall also induces multinationals to repatriate their production into a single country, which is likely to be...

To date, empirical investigations of trade liberalization under the conditions of increasing returns to scale (IRS) and imperfect competition (IC) have either assumed or imposed the market and productive structures necessary for such a model. However, of the recent IRS/IC models used to simulate...

The robust empirical finding that exporting firms are systematically different from firms that merely serve domestic consumers has inspired the development of a new brand of trade theory, the theory of heterogeneous firms and trade. The establishment of a canonical model due to Melitz (2003) has...