This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

There are countries that do not fall under the prevailing definitions of developed and developing country that are employed by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO fails to take into account the special circumstances and needs of these countries. While such special circumstances and needs...

In this paper we examine the reasons behind the remarkable export performance of transition economies in the last two decades. Following Redding and Venables (2004, 2004a) and Fugazza (2004), we decompose export performance into the gains due to the advantageous access to foreign markets and...

This paper sets up a two country monopolistic competition model with intra-industry trade to study the effects of an exogenous differential in wage and social policies on the location of industry. Two model scenarios are considered. In the traditional one with physical capital, such a...

To examine the effects of heterogeneous labor mobility on the distribution of industries and analyze the subsidy policy for attracting firms, this paper develops an analytically solvable new economic geography model, which incorporates heterogeneous locational preferences and an intra-industry...

This study quantifies the uneven welfare gains from trade between firm owners and workers in a multi-country model of monopolistic competition under a demand system of constant elasticity of substitution (CES). An agent decides to start up her own firm or to be employed as a worker according to...

We revisit the debate on the benefits of international financial integration. We build a two-country model with an international duopoly to examine how the liberalization of international capital flows, affects the welfare of each country and their joint welfare. Our results show that...

This paper aims to fill the gap between theoretical and empirical studies of home market effects (HMEs). On one hand, empirical studies on the price aspect of HMEs -- that wages are higher in larger markets -- are supportive, but studies on the quantity aspect -- that the firm share in the...

Remarkable growth of export performance of transition economies has been one of the most outstanding features of the transition and EU integration processes. The paper looks at the reasons behind this phenomenon. Following Redding and Venables (2003, 2004), and Fugazza (2004), we distinguish...

This paper uses a two country trade and geography model of monopolistic competition to study the effects of wage policies and social policies on the location of industry. It is first shown that a union wage push in one of two otherwise identical countries induces a relocation of firms which...