This paper explores the quantitative consequences of transatlantic trade liberalization envisioned in a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. Our key innovation is to develop a new quantitative spatial trade model and to use an...

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...

This paper is motivated by the fact that, contrary to its importance in practice, the role of land for production has received no attention in the new trade theory and the new economic geography. We set up a simple monopolistic competition model and we show that, due to the factor proportions...

Entrepreneurs who decide to enter an industry are faced with different levels of effective entry costs in different countries. These costs are heavily influenced by economic policy. What is not well understood is how international trade affects the government incentive to impact on entry costs,...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

This paper pursues three aims. First, we provide a review of current theoretical advances which pertain to the relationship between trade, FDI and labor markets. We do so under the following (not mutually exclusive) headings: (1) slicing-up the value added chain and the turn to a task-based...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern and the efficiency of the market equilibrium. This reflects the fact that these models rely heavily on specific...

This paper provides a simple theory of geographical mobility which simultaneously explains people’s choice of residences in space and the location of industry. Residences are chosen on the basis of the utility which mobile households obtain across locations. The spatial pattern of industry is...