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.

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 China's tariff rates at WTO accession using a political economy approach. A model drawing on Branstetter and Feenstra (<link/>) is used to derive an optimal tariff rate for each industry. The model predicts that a government would set a high tariff rate if an industry is of large stateowned...

This paper analyzes whether complexity, measured by the number of skilled tasks that are performed in production, explains countries commodity trade structure. We modify the Romalis (<link/>) model to incorporate advantage differences in complexity across commodities together with differences in the...

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.

Trade barriers can cause output to be diverted to other countries and into other products. We study the effect of a voluntary price restraint (VPR) on Mexican tomatoes entering the United States. The diversion caused by the VPR is statistically and economically significant - representing over...

Should international trade agreements be extended to include negotiations over environmental policy? The answer depends on whether countries distort levels of environmental regulations as a secondary means of providing protection to domestic industries; our results suggest that they do. Previous...

In this paper we find that the estimates of Armington elasticities (the elasticity of substitution between groups of products identified by country of origin) obtained from multilateral trade data can differ from those obtained from bilateral trade data. In particular, the former tends to be...

The recent microeconomic literature on international trade has highlighted the importance of firm characteristics and trade costs for exports. This study provides evidence on one type of those costs, the costs of doing business overseas, from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Controlling...

We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant-level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being...