This paper develops an idea flows theory of trade and growth with heterogeneous firms. New firms learn from incumbent firms, but the diffusion technology ensures entrants learn not only from frontier technologies, but from the entire technology distribution. By shifting the productivity...

One third of Chinese exporters sell more than ninety percent of their production abroad. We argue that this distinctive pattern is attributable to a wide range of subsidies that provide incentives to these “pure exporters”. We propose a heterogeneous firm model in which firms exporting all...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level “ability” and firmproduct- level “expertise”, both of which are stochastic and...

This paper studies the role of quality competition in endogenous growth and institutional factors which can affect growth through affecting quality competition. The R&D-based growth literature as it stands attributes the incentives for innovations to monopolist market structure, and regards the...

We examine the qualitative and quantitative predictions of a heterogeneous firm model à la Melitz (2003) in the context of the Canada - US Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) of 1989. We calibrate our model to the pre-trade liberalization stage, simulate the trade liberalization, and compute the...

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on heterogeneous firms and trade, whichemphasizes firm selection into international markets and reallocations of resources acrossfirms. We discuss the empirical challenges that motivated this research and its relationship totraditional trade...

This paper analyzes mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a previously neglected channel of industrial restructuring in the face of trade liberalization. Using the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement of 1989 as a natural experiment, I show that trade liberalization leads to a significant...

This technical Appendix describes the structural model used as part of the Spatial Eco- nomic Research Centre's work for the Northern Way on linkages between the Manchester and Leeds City Regions. A summary of the research, as well as a full report of the findings, can be found on the web-sites...

What factors underlie industry differences in research intensity and productivity growth? We develop a multisector growth model using standard parameters to capture the main factors considered in the empirical R&D and productivity growth literature. Along the balanced growth path, we find that...

We develop a multi-sector general equilibrium model in which productivity growth is driven by the production of sector-specific knowledge. In the model, we find that long run differences in total factor productivity growth across sectors are independent of the parameters of the knowledge...