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.

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...

We analyze the sourcing strategies of firms active in the Spanish manufacturing sector. We show that firms that select strategies of vertical integration and of foreign sourcing ex post tend to have been more productive, ex ante, than other firms.

This paper shows that tariffs and production subsidies can Pareto-improve welfare in a small open economy when a government is concerned with income redistribution under asymmetric information. In international trade theory, free trade is optimal if the government can use lump-sum taxes and...

This paper investigates two explanations for why industries might become more productive over time. The first explanation, termed the real productivity case,' is one in which firms become more productive and this leads to more productive industries. The second explanation, termed the...

This paper explores a number of conceptual issues that are germane to the analysis of conflict and cooperation in international economic policy and law. The focus is on issues involving conflict and cooperation that have been treated in the theory of international trade, in particular departures...

In this paper, we adapt the latest version of the Michigan Model of World Production and Trade to incorporate relationships and data for cross-border services trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) in the major developed and developing countries subsumed in the model's structure and database.

We investigate the significance of subcontracting arrangements as a source of knowledge transfer and increased efficiency for Czech firms during 1993 through 1996. We draw on detailed enterprise surveys and interviews with the managers of 373 manufacturing firms in the Prague region. The results...

The paper provides a brief overview of the new World Trade Organization, successor to the GATT as the arbiter of cooperation in matters of international trade policy.

We use a special constructed version of the Michigan Brown-Deardorff-Stern (BDS) Computational General Equilibrium (CGE) Model of World production and Trade to estimate the potential economic effects on the Tunisian economy that may result from the free trade agreement (FTA) between Tunisia and...