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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Numerous gravity applications have resorted to panel data econometric techniques over the past decade. However, with the theory of gravity being so far only static, these estimations lack solid structural dynamic foundations. As a consequence, a consensus on a unified dynamic gravity estimation...

In this paper, we analyze the offshoring decision of firms whose production process is characterized by a particular sequence of steps. International cost differences vary non-monotonically along the production chain, and moving unfinished goods across borders incurs transport costs. We show...