Host country governments often grant tax holidays to foreign firms located in their territories. Although such preferential tax treatment appears to disadvantage local competitors who try to enter the new markets, tax holidays can actually facilitate entry by local firms. This procompetitive...

With the America Invents Act of 2011, the U.S. changed its patent-issuing rule from first-to-invent to first-to-file, the international norm. We investigate the effect of such a policy change in a two-country model of R&D competition for two sequential (basic and final) inventions. We find that...

This paper addresses two questions: 1) Does R&D cooperation facilitate price collusion; and 2) Why do R&D partnerships break up at high rates (20% in one estimate)? Innovation creates an interfirm cost asymmetry, which makes collusion difficult to sustain. The prospect of collusion ending with...

We examine the role of cost uncertainty in a firm's choice between exporting and foreign investment in oligopolistic industry. We consider both foreign direct investment and an international joint venture, and allow country-specific and firm-specific cost uncertainty. Unlike exporting, either...

Suppose consumers buy complementary goods sequentially from several monopolists. If prices cannot be contracted on, there may be no sale in a one-shot game due to the holdup problem. Dynamic interaction of agents attenuates the problem. In equilibrium, the first and the last monopolist capture...

We compare the relative effect of a voluntary export restraint (VER) and a price undertaking on foreign firms' incentive to engage in FDI. We emphasize foreign rivalry as a determinant of FDI. We show, in a model that has two foreign firms competing with a home firm in the home country, that a...

This paper considers a new-product firm's choice between exporting and foreign direct investment (FDI) to access foreign markets. We find that, when quality is unknown to buyers, the firm may choose FDI over exporting to signal quality, even though FDI is a costlier mode of access than...

We examine the standard assumption in the strategic trade policy literature that governments possess complete information. Assuming instead that firms have better information, we explore the long-term incentives for firms to consistently disclose information to their governments in the standard...

We examine a foreign firm's choice between exporting and foreign direct investment (FDI) under country-specific cost uncertainty. Unlike exporting, FDI exposes foreign and home firms to common shocks. This results in a correlation of strategies, harming the firms. However, the exposure to common...

We examine whether cooperation in R&D leads to product market collusion. Suppose firms compete in a stochastic R&D race while maintaining the collusive equilibrium in a repeated-game framework. Innovation creates a cost asymmetry and destabilizes the collusive equilibrium. Firms forming an R&D...