This investigation pits Cournot oligopolists against each other in a model of quality and R&D choice. A firm gains a strategic advantage over its rival when it is able to sell in more countries due to the jointness of quality improvements across production locations. Trade barriers that restrict...

Recent evidence shows that developing countries and transition economies are increasingly privatising their public firms and at the same time experiencing rapid growth of inward foreign direct investment (FDI). In an international mixed oligopoly, we analyse the interaction between privatisation...

We develop a mixed oligopoly model with one public firm and two private firms to explore the licensing strategy considered by the innovated private firm. The major findings of our paper are that: firstly, if the patentee licenses the public firm under some plausible parametric range, the public...

We analyze an oligopolistic market where a domestic and a foreign firm are engaged in a takeover battle for a domestic competitor. Any merger or acquisition (M&A) must be approved by a welfare maximizing domestic competition agency which may or may not be prone to "economic patriotism". A...

This paper studies the behavior of firms towards weak labor rights in developing countries (South). A less than perfectly elastic labor supply in the South gives firms oligopsonistic power tempting them to strategically reduce output to cut wages. In an open economy, competitors operating in...

Public opinion in Europe seems worried about the effect of lower-wage country competition. In both newspaper articles and in policy debates, the term ‘social dumping’ is becoming more and more popular. In many countries, trade unions worried by the effect of what they call ‘unfair...

Parallel imports are a significant academic and policy issue. Official investigations into the impact of parallel imports on music CD prices have reached widely conflicting conclusions. This note reports an event study on an international panel of changes in copyright law to permit or disallow...

This paper addresses the role that foreign vs. domestic ownership of companies plays for governments in asymmetric countries’ competition for a multinational’s subsidiary. I argue that equilibrium subsidies as well as a foreign investor’s location decision in policy competition between...

In this paper, we offer an explanation why globalization (falling trade costs) may increase the government incentive to block foreign takeover of domestic firms and increase its incentive to allow mergers among national firms. This creation of `national champions' occurs not only because the...