We examine the preferences of a foreign firm and a local government over two modes of foreign direct investment: de novo entry and acquisition of the domestic incumbent. Two crucial features of the model are network externalities and partial incompatibility between the domestic and the foreign...

This paper analyses the steel safeguards applied during 2001-3. Results reveal that for shareholders of U.S. steel companies safeguards generated positive `abnormal' returns of approximately 6%. The cancellation of the safeguards resulted in wealth gains of about 5%. Steel shareholders...

In this paper, we examine the impact of competition in the banking industry on financial market activity. In particular, we explore this issue in a setting where banks simultaneously insure individuals against liquidity risk and offer loans to promote intertemporal consumption smoothing. In...

A model of monopolistic competition is presented in which the relation between the productivity and input size of producers is non-monotonic and bell-shaped. The model predicts that markets matter and the average size of the producers is directly scaled by the size of the market. An indirect...

This study analyzes the impact of opening up markets on the diffusion of flexible manufacturing in a general equilibrium framework. With flexible manufacturing, suppliers can service a range of downstream industries and do not have to be concerned about being held up. Instead, the vertical...

Technology effects, business process development, and productivity growth are considered in the context of a single company: Wal-Mart. The starting point is the 2001 McKinsey Global Institute report, which finds that over 1995-2000, a quarter of U.S. productivity growth is attributable to the...

This paper examines the joint pricing decision of products in a firm's product line. When products are distinguished by a vertical characteristic, those with higher values of that characteristic will command higher prices. We investigate whether, holding the value of the characteristic constant,...

We introduce a new data set on over 230,000 monthly prices for 10 goods in 50 Canadian cities over the 40-year period from 1910 to 1950. This information, coupled with previously published price information from the late twentieth century, allows us to present one of the first comprehensive...

The average expense ratio paid by Canadian mutual fund investors is 50% higher than that paid in the United States. This discrepancy is commonly thought to exist because Canadian funds do not take advantage of economies of scale and have less competition. A monopolistic competition framework is...