This paper discusses the role of secret versus public reserve prices when bidders’ valuations depend positively on the seller’s private signal. A public reserve price is announced before the auction starts, and a secret reserve price is disclosed after the highest bid has been reached. The...

This paper examines the link between a firm's owership of productive assets and its choice of foreign-market entry strategy. We find that, controlling for industry- and country-specific characteristics, the most productive firms (i.e., those owning the most assets) will enter through greenfield...

This paper studies why multinational firms often share ownership of a foreign affiliate with a local partner even in the absence of government restrictions on ownership. We show that shared ownership may arise, if (i) the partner owns assets that are potentially important for the investment...

Multinationals may enter a host market by different modes of foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper examines the choice of FDI mode, and shows that the profitability of greenfield investment influences this choice not only directly, but also indirectly since it determines the outside option...

This paper develops an oligopolistic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D to examine how trade liberalization affects firm and industry productivity, as well as social welfare. We identify four effects of trade liberalization on productivity: (i) a direct...

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often vertically integrated firms which operate in key industries like transport, telecommunication and power generation. They provide an infrastructure and invest in its quality. We discuss the effects of liberalization and their privatization which can be...

This paper studies non-cooperative commodity taxation in a trade model with im-perfect competition and trade costs. Nationally optimal tax policy simultaneously tries to correct the domestic distortion from imperfect competition and to shift rents to the home country. Importantly, this trade-off...

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on environmental policy stringency in a two-country model with trade costs, where FDI could be unilateral and bilateral and both governments address local pollution through environmental taxes. We show that FDI does not give rise...

This paper discusses environmental policies which aim at a sustainable use of domestic resources which are mobile. It assumes that one country introduces such a policy but the other country does not. If a resource is mobile, strict domestic environmental policies may increase the resource...