Some cultural goods are consumed socially and are characterized by the same consumption network externalities as languages. Also, producers of new cultural goods in any one country draw on the stock of ideas generated by previous cultural production in all countries. For such goods, costless...

This paper is concerned with the sustainability of free-trade agreements (FTA). FTA sustainability is influenced by governments' valuations of political contributions, discount factors, the lobbying position of the specific-interest groups in the intra-industry trade sectors, and the sectoral...

We conduct a welfare comparison of MFN and tariff discrimination in an oligopoly model of trade between two exporting countries and one importing country. While MFN dominates tariff discrimination from a world welfare perspective when exporting countries are asymmetric with respect to either...

This paper studies the occurrence of dumping and the implications of anti-dumping duties in a deterministic price-setting two-period duopoly model for differentiated products. When current market shares matter for future demand, cost-based dumping can be profitable. Dumping thus arises as a form...

In recent years antidumping protection has spread throughout the world. Evidence shows that antidumping often targets R&D-intensive sectors, raising a concern that it may adversely affect worldwide investments in R&D. We investigate this issue in a model of reciprocal dumping extended to a...

Although the GATT prohibits discriminatory import tariffs, it includes means for circumventing this prohibition. The previous literature uses static models and discriminatory tariffs increase welfare. In a dynamic model, if governments lack the ability to precommit, this is not necessarily true....

In this paper we explore the design of optimal incentive-compatible anti-dumping (AD) measures. When the weight given to the domestic firm's profit in the government's objective function is relatively small, it is shown that no AD duty should be imposed if the foreign firm reports its own costs,...

This paper demonstrates that the degree of state ownership affects neither the level of socially optimal activities nor welfare if the government chooses optimal trade policy instruments. In the case of rivalry in the home market, the optimal import tariff is independent of the degree of state...

Regional agreements on standards have been largely ignored by economists and blessed by multilateral trade rules. Using a constructed panel data that identifies the different types of agreements at the industry level, we find that such agreements increase the trade between participating...

In this paper I examine strategic policy for product R&D in an international duopoly where domestic and foreign firms are identical. It is shown that strategic R&D policy is described by a subsidy schedule contingent on firms' quality choices. Unilateral policy enables its domestic firm to...