Many trade models of monopolistic competition identify cost efficiency as the main determinant of firm performance in export markets. To date, the analysis of demand factors has received much less attention. We propose a new model where consumer preferences are asymmetric across varieties and...

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...

The recent availability of trade data at a firm-product-country level calls for a new generation of models able to exploit the large variability detected across observations. By developing a model of monopolistic competition in which varieties enter preferences non-symmetrically, we show how...

This paper investigates the impacts of progressive trade openness, technological externalities,and heterogeneity of individuals on the formation of entrepreneurship in a two-countryoccupation choice model. We show that trade opening gives rise to a non-monotonic processof international...

We develop a model of commodity tax competition with monopolistically competitive internationallymobile firms, transport costs, and asymmetric country sizes. We investigate the impacts of noncooperativetax setting, as well as of tax harmonization and changes in the tax principle, in both...

The recent availability of trade data at a firm-product-country level calls for a new generation of models able to exploit the large variability detected across observations. By developing a model of monopolistic competition in which varieties enter preferences non-symmetrically, we show how...

We analyze how the interplay between urban costs, wage wedges, and trade costs may affect the interregional location of firms as wel l as the intraurban location, within the central business district or in a secondary employment center (SEC) of the selected region. In this way, we investigate,...

We investigate how differences in set-up costs of various types affect the trade-off between global efficiency and spatial equity and show that the standard assumption of symmetry in fixed costs masks the existence of an interesting effect: the range of available varieties varies depends on the...

Spatial economics aims to explain the location of economic activity. While the importance of the proximity to natural resources has declined considerably, distance and location have not disappeared from economic life. Recent work in spatial economics indicates that new forces, hitherto...

There is a wide consensus among international institutions and national governments in favor of compact (i.e. densely populated) cities as a way to improve the ecological performance of the transport system. Indeed, when both the intercity and intra-urban distributions of activities are given, a...