We use a simple framework where firms in two countries serve their respective domestic markets and a world market to analyze under which conditions cost-reducing mergers will be beneficial for the merging firms, the home country, and the world as a whole. For a national merger, the policies...

In a two-country international trade model with oligopolistic competition, we study the conditions on market structure and trade costs under which a merger policy designed to benefit domestic consumers is too tough or too lenient from the viewpoint of the foreign country. Calibrating the model...

We study upstream horizontal mergers and their potential efficiency gains. We show that an upstream horizontal merger can give rise to two efficiency-enhancing effects when firms trade through two-part tariffs. It increases R&D investments and decreases wholesale prices when downstream...

We build a model of tacit collusion between firms that operate in multiple markets to study the effects of trade costs. A key feature of the model is that cartel discipline is endogenous. Thus, markets that appear segmented are strategically linked via the incentive compatibility constraint....

This study explores the effect of parallel imports (PIs) when the producer may discriminate repair and maintenance services against PI units. This service discrimination weakens intrabrand competition and reduces the degree of price convergence between countries. If the producer makes costly...

We quantify the economic impact of a potential secession of Catalonia from Spain. Using a novel dataset of trade flows between 17 Spanish sub-national regions and 142 countries, we estimate effects of different levels of borders on trade flows and uncover heterogeneity in country-to-country,...

We study the gains from trade in a model with oligopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and innovation, and provide a formula to decompose the mechanism. The new insight we provide is that market concentration can be a welfare-relevant feature of market power above and beyond markup...

We study the effect of a merger between two Dutch supermarket chains to assess its effect on the depth as well as composition of assortment. We adopt a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits local variation in the merger's effects, controlling for selection on observables through a...

What has been the overall global welfare impact of the accession to the World Trade Organization of a large country like China, or the global welfare impact of the completion of the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations? Can we come up with a simple user-friendly formula to calculate the global...

We propose and apply methods to quantify the impact of national institutions on international trade and development. We are able to identify the direct impact of country-specific institutions on international trade within the structural gravity framework. Our approach naturally addresses the...