We analyse the impact of increased outside opportunities brought to consumers by access to a global market on local market performance under monopoly versus oligopoly. If consumers have to choose once where to shop we show that under all forms of organizing the local market, increased...

We study the effects of improvements in eBay's rating mechanism on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. Following a large sample of sellers over time, we exploit the fact that the rating mechanism was changed to reduce strategic bias in buyer rating. That improvement did not lead to...

This paper evaluates the effects of the FAMEX export promotion program in Tunisia on the performance of beneficiary firms. While most studies assess only the short-term impact of such programs, we consider also the longer-term impact. Estimates suggest that beneficiaries initially saw both...

The focus of trade policy has shifted in recent years from economy-wide reductions in tariffs and trade restrictions towards targeted interventions to facilitate trade and promote exports. Most of these latter interventions are based on the new mantra of "aid-for-trade" rather than on hard...

Feedback mechanisms that allow partners to rate each other after a transaction are considered crucial for the success of anonymous internet trading platforms. We document an asymmetry in the feedback behaviour on eBay, propose an explanation based on the micro structure of the feedback mechanism...

This paper investigates whether the Pesticides Initiative Program has significantly affected the export performance of Senegal's horticulture industry. We apply two main microeconometric techniques, difference-in-difference and matching difference-in-differences to identify the effect of the...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer --- the seller --- follows from a non--trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer--induced certification acts as an inspection device, whence...

This paper documents a decreasing trend in the geographical concentration of EU agro-food imports. Decomposing the concentration indices into intensive and extensive margins components, we find that the decrease in overall concentration indices results from two diverging trends: the pattern of...

This paper estimates the effect of the decision to import intermediate goods and capital equipment on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) at the firm level on a panel of Spanish firms covering the period between 1991 and 2002. We use two alternative approaches. In the first, we estimate TFP using...

We endogenize the market risk (at given technical risk) in firms’ R&D decisions by introducing stochastic R&D in the Hotelling model. It is shown that if the technical risk is sufficiently high, the market risk remains low even if firms pursue similar projects. This leads firms to focus on the...