Our aim is to explain how a small country can be viable as an international banking center (IBC). We build a model in which mobile investors choose between two banking centers located respectively in a small country and in a large country. These countries compete in two instruments, taxation and...

In this paper we study how the trade costs and the intensity of competition can explain the existence of bilateral trade, unilateral trade and no trade within an industry. We show as trade costs decrease from very high to very low values, the global economy moves from autarky to a regime of...

Armchair evidence shows that many industries are made of a few big commercial or manufacturing firms, which are able to affect the market outcome, and of a myriad of small family-run businesses with very few employees, each of which has a negligible impact on the market. Examples can be found in...

Empirical research on strategic alliances has focused on the idea that alliance partners are selected on the basis of social capital considerations. In this paper we emphasize instead the role of complementary knowledge stocks (broadly defined) in partner selection, arguing not only that...

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition and derive a complete characterization of the market equilibrium using the concept of Relative Love for Variety. When the RLV increases with individual consumption, the market generates pro-competitive effects. When it decreases, the market...

We study the impact of an offshore financial center on the economy in the presence or absence of bank secrecy in a two-country setting with heterogeneous investors who choose where to deposit their savings. Rather than focussing on tax competition, we acknowledge that countries use two...

We study how the level of trade costs and the intensity of competition interact to explain the nature and intensity of trade within a given industry and the location of firms across countries. As trade costs decrease from very high to very low values, the global economy moves from autarky to...

This paper explains why and how a small country can be an offshore financial center (OFC). We build a model involving a small and a large country competing for portfolio investments. They use two instruments, taxation and institutional infrastructure. We identify the conditions for an OFC to be...