The standard race-to-the-bottom result is curious in one respect. If a nation wants to attract foreign capital, providing the optimal level of public amenities (and thus charging the optimal tax rate) would seem optimal. This conjecture fails in the standard tax competition model since foreign...

The present paper focuses on sorting as a mechanism behind the well-established fact that there is a central region productivity premium. Using a model of heterogeneous firms that can move between regions, Baldwin and Okubo (2006) show how more productive firms sort themselves to the large core...

This paper uses a monopolistic competitive framework with many sectors to study the impact of trade liberalization on local and global emissions. We focus on the interplay of the pollution haven effect and the home market effect and show how a large-market advantage can counterbalance a high...

This paper introduces scale economies or density economies in transportation in a trade and geography model with heterogeneous firms. This relatively small change to the standard model produces a new pattern of spatial sorting among …firms. Contrary to the existing literature, our model...

This paper analyses industrial policy in a high wage open economy hosting an agglomeration consisting of vertically linked upstream and downstream firms. Optimal policy towards upstream and downstream industries differ radically in this setting. However the restriction that the agglomeration...

Using a simple monopoly model, this note analyses the incentives of a vaccine producer. Because a vaccine tends to eradicate the disease for wich it is intended, it also tends to destroy its own market. This means that monopolistic producers may be tempted, in a socially non-optimal way, to...

Tax competition between two countries is considered in a trade- and-location setting with differentiated products and monopolistic competition. There are two groups of workers, mobile ones and immobile ones. Taxes are used for producing a public good. It is shown that an equilibrium with mobile...

This paper first presents stylised evidence showing how the date of the introduction of competition policy is correlated with country size. Smaller countries tend to adopt competition policy later. We thereafter present a simple theoretical model with countries of different size and firms...

Many countries devote a large part of their national budget to regional policy. This paper analyses the interaction of economic integration and some typical regional policies in a new economic geography model with three regions of different size. The policies analysed are the relocation of...

This paper compares the effect of economic integration on industry location for a small country that goes ahead with an integration process, such as the European, and a country adopting a wait and see strategy. Theoretical results, derived from a three-region new economic geography model, are...