We demonstrate that the Varian (1980) model of sales has a unique Nash equilibrium when firms incur costly advertising to compete for informed consumers. The equilibrium is symmetric. In particular, with costly advertising, the asymmetric equilibria highlighted by Baye et al. (1992) do not arise.

This paper examines how an appreciation of the currency of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)—renminbi—affects the country’s exports in the context of production fragmentation, using a panel data set of the PRC’s trade for 1992/93–2008/09. It constructs two exchange rates for...

This paper studies how East Asia’s trade composition and orientation have changed over the past decade and analyzes the implications for the region and beyond. Over the last 2 decades we have witnessed the emergence of regional and global supply chains, in which production is divided into...

The results highlight the conflicting interests of countries — to stabilize exchange rates or to keep the option of exchange rate depreciation in order to maintain competitiveness of domestic tradable producers. With deepening integration in East Asia, however, the desire for exchange rate...

Empirical evidence suggests that the emergence of international production networks in East Asia results from market-driven forces such as vertical specialization and higher production costs in the home countries and institutional-led reasons such as free trade agreements. This paper examines...

We show that, in general, consistent estimates of cost pass-through are not obtained from reduced-form regressions of price on cost. We derive a formal approximation for the bias that arises even under standard orthogonality conditions. We provide guidance on the conditions under which bias may...

We analyze the sourcing strategies of firms active in the Spanish manufacturing sector. We show that firms that select strategies of vertical integration and of foreign sourcing ex post tend to have been more productive, ex ante, than other firms.

This paper examines the determinants and trade effects of the South Asian Preferential Trading Arrangement (SAPTA) using empirical methods. An empirical specification of the gravity model is developed to analyze the determinants of trade flows for the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA)...

This paper aims to provide a non-technical explanation of the concept of trade in value added, with particular reference to East Asia. The trade in value added approach allows us to redefine the relationship between countries of origin and destination in international trade, and thereby...

This paper focuses on the pricing behavior of Japanese and United States firms selling their identical products in New York City, Chicago, Osaka, and Tokyo. The authors utilize some simple models of international price dispersion and market segmentation that generate predictions about testable...