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.

Do pro-trade effects of free trade agreements reflect timing of policy or dynamic trade adjustment? Only the latter involves dynamic welfare gains. I find that dynamic trade adjustment is as important as the immediate impact effect of free trade agreements.

This paper uses survival analysis to investigate the effect of innovation on export duration of 105 countries at the product level. The estimation shows that the duration of exports increases with innovation. The effect is stronger for differentiated products than for homogeneous products. The...

We provide evidence showing that the degree of diversification of import sources of finely disaggregated commodities rises monotonically along the growth path. This result is robust to different measures of import diversification and the inclusion of a large set of additional control variables....

Using Japanese firm-level data, I examine whether more productive multinational enterprises (MNEs) invest in a larger number of foreign regions in the manufacturing sector. I employ the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test to compare the overall distribution of productivity by multinational status. I...

We examine learning-by-exporting effects of manufacturing and services firms in 19 sub-Saharan African countries. Comparing several outlier-robust estimators, our results provide evidence for positive effects in the manufacturing sector when using the MM estimator, but not in the services sector.

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...

This paper uses plant-level data from Chile to show that an increase in sector-wide exports decreases the survival probability of exporters, but not that of non-exporters. We argue that this result can be explained by the fact that exporters and non-exporters use factors of production in...

The prevalence of Internet-based sales was highlighted by the World Bank (Ferro, 2011) associating state-of-art technology with exporters. We use propensity score kernel matching with difference-in-differences to reveal export selection and evidence of ‘technology upgrading’ through higher...

In this paper, I empirically examine the non-monotonic relationship between openness and within-group wage inequality predicted by  Helpman et al. (2010) using a panel data for the US, 1983–2005. Within-group wage inequality is measured for each industry and matched with exports. It can be...