We develop a new model of trade in which educational institutions drive comparative advantage and determine the distribution of human capital within and across countries. Our framework exploits a multiplicity of sectors and the continuous support of human capital choices to demonstrate that...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) occurs in temporal clusters. In contrast to the existing literature, which explains these clusters as being a result of oligopolistic reaction, this paper presents a two-by-two-by-two general equilibrium model of companies which engage in monopolistic competition....

This paper explores the role of pooled-producer, e.g. private label, trade intermediation in shaping the range and diversity of exports. Direct sales maintain a firm's unique product characteristics (`brand equity'), whereas trade through an intermediary can take two forms — either a...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

This paper develops an efficiency theory of contingent trade policies. We model the competition for a domestic market between one domestic and one foreign firm as a pricing game under incomplete information about production costs. The cost distributions are asymmetric because the foreign firm...

In the last decades, foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased strongly among industrialised countries. U.S. companies were the first to set up foreign affiliates followed later by companies from smaller industrialised countries. This paper develops a general equilibrium model of...

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...

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...