The paper develops a simple theoretical model of inventory control in global supply chains. It identifies a role for intermediaries in managing inventory, and shows that inserting an intermediary as an additional link in a supply chain is profitable when demand volatility is high. It also...

The paper discusses the impact of environmental policies on international competitiveness of industries. Two positions are taken in the current debate on this issue. One the one hand, strict environmental policies are blamed for imposing substantiell costs which worsen international...

National and multinational companies coexist in many sectors of all developed countries. However, economic models fail to reproduce this fact because of the assumption of symmetry between companies. To show that the symmetry assumption is the reason for this failure, a two-country general...

Whereas many empirical studies show that the internationalization of production is driven by falling distance costs, theoretical models of the endogenous emergence of multinational enterprises predict the opposite. This paper argues that this dichotomy can be resolved if the production process...

The Central East European economies are competing for international investment capital, especially for FDI in order to support transformation. The paper explores how the Siemens AG, one of the world's largest MNCs, allocates investments towards and within Central East Europe and how they fit...

Hybrid governance structures between markets and hierarchies in many industries, e.g., in energy and telecommunications, challenge antitrust and regulation policy. The paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological basis provided by the New Institutional Economics (NIE) for analyzing the...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

We construct a model of trade with heterogeneous retailers to examine the effects of trade liberalization on retail market structure, imports and social welfare. We are especially interested in studying the degree of pass-through of import into retail prices and the effects of retail market...

This paper uses an oligopoly model with heterogeneous firms to examine how an industry adjusts to rising import competition. The model predicts that in the short run the least efficient firms in the industry become inactive, surviving firms face a fall in output, mark-ups and profits, and the...

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolitic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...