Entrepreneurs who decide to enter an industry are faced with different levels of effective entry costs in different countries. These costs are heavily influenced by economic policy. What is not well understood is how international trade affects the government incentive to impact on entry costs,...

We develop a two-country model with monopolistic competition and heterogeneous firms where entrants pay a sunk cost and randomly draw their productivity level. Governments collect lump-sum taxes and subsidize these sunk entry costs for the domestic entrepreneurs. One motive for this policy,...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern. Some models imply a catastrophic agglomeration process with hysteresis, so that concentration in one region is not...

Entrepreneurs who decide to enter an industry are faced with different levels of effective entry costs in different countries. These costs are heavily influenced by economic policy. What is not well understood is how international trade affects the government incentive to impact on entry costs,...

This paper studies the social desirability of agglomeration and the efficiency arguments for policy intervention in a simple, analytically solvable "new economic geography" model with two trade integrating regions. The location pattern emerging as market equilibrium is "bubble-shaped", i.e. it...

The core-periphery model by Krugman (1991) has two 'dramatic' implications: catastrophic agglomeration and locational hysteresis. We study this seminal model with CES instead of Cobb-Douglas upper tier preferences. This small generalization suffices to change these stark implications. For a wide...

Models of the new economic geography share a number of common conclusions, but also exhibit notable differences, in particular with respect to the shape of the location pattern and the efficiency of the market equilibrium. This reflects the fact that these models rely heavily on specific...