Rules often are complex in order to distinguish different types of behavior that may have different consequences. Greater complexity thus allows better control of behavior. But individuals may need to incur costs ex ante to determine how more complex rules apply to their contemplated conduct....

Rules often are complex in order to distinguish different types of behavior that may have different consequences. Greater complexity thus allows better control of behavior. But individuals may need to incur costs ex ante to determine how more complex rules apply to their contemplated conduct....

The competitive allocation of labor across different sectors of an economy may not be socially optimal when one sector uses foreign capital. We argue that a suitably designed government intervention is required to restrict the sectors to their optimal size and maximize national welfare. Such a...

Marshallian districts are locales that accommodate a large number of small firms producing similar goods to be exported and benefit from the accumulation of know-how associated with workers residing there. We study the making of such districts by assuming that the cost function of a firm is a...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we present a new model of agglomeration and trade that displays the main features of the recent economic geography literature while allowing for the derivation of analytical results by means of simple algebra. Second, we show how this framework can be...

In a world of globalisation, it is tempting to foresee the 'death of distance' and, once the impediments to mobility have declined sufficiently, to wait for the predictions of the neo-classical theory of factor mobility to materialise. According to this theory, production factors respond to...

Barriers to outsourcing that are being currently implemented in the US effectively tax its companies who export jobs through outsourcing. The objective is to raise domestic employment. Given that many of the important international markets where the US has a comparative advantage feature...

International joint ventures (JV) are popular institutional forms chosen by the less developed countries (LDCs) to attract foreign Investments. In this paper we describe a set up where a multinational firm (MNF) decides on the volume of investment and the LDC gov-ernment offers a package...

We study the possibility of cartel formation among primary exporters who face an inelastic world demand for their exports. By constructing an appropriate infinitely repeated export game, we show that varying country sizes will pose difficulties in sustaining the collusive behaviour.