In a two-country Hotelling type duopoly model of price competition, we show that parallel import (PI) policy can act as an instrument of strategic trade policy. The home firm's profit is higher when it <i>cannot</i> price discriminate internationally if and only if the foreign market is sufficiently...

Motivated by GATT, we endogenize the formation of a club whose members have to abide by the MFN principle of non-discrimination. The underlying model is that of oligopolistic intraindustry trade. While an MFN club does not alter average tariff levels across countries, it increases aggregate...

Recent theoretical work predicts a new margin of firm adjustment to trade liberalization; that is, multi-product firms alter their product mix to focus on their core competencies in response to trade liberalization. Using detailed product data from U.S. public firms, I find strong empirical...

In theoretical literature it is common to make the assumption that in a multi-country, multi-good world, the direction of trade (import and export by commodity) is predetermined and fixed for each good for each country. We consider a simple three-country, three-good, pure-exchange model with CES...

The authors test whether the findings of John McCallum (1995) and John F. Helliwell (1996)--that the Canada-U.S. border substantially decreases trade--are evident in Canada's trade with the rest of the world. They also test whether there are differences across provinces and between each...

Borders affect the composition, not only the level, of interregional trade. In disaggregated U.S. Commodity Flow data, border effects vary substantially across commodities. Substantial border-induced compositional change suggests the possibility that standard estimates suffer from aggregation...

Why do borders still matter for economic activity? The reunification of Germany in 1990 provides a unique natural experiment for examining the effect of political borders on trade. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid formation of a political and economic union, strong and strictly...

In this paper the impact of national borders on international trade within the European Union is considered. Using a gravity model, I find that, averaged over all EU countries, intranational trade is about ten times as high as international trade with an EU partner country of similar size and...

When firms in the same industry located in different regions or countries experience shocks to production costs in their respective industries that are imperfectly correlated, arbitrage opportunities automatically lead to trade. Trade can either stabilize or destabilize the price faced by...

Recent `open-economy industrial organization' literature finds export orientation enhances the weight of post-merger international competitive gains, favouring lenient domestic merger policy. However, mergers seldom generate the `significant synergies' supportive of international competitive...