Recent literature on the workhorse model of intra-industry trade has explored heterogeneous cost structures at the firm level. These approaches have proven to add realism and predictive power. This paper presents a new and simple heterogeneous-firms specification. We develop a symmetric...

Recent literature on the workhorse model of intra-industry trade has explored heterogeneous cost structures at the firm level. These approaches have proven to add realism and predictive power. This paper presents a new and simple heterogeneous-firms specification. We develop a symmetric...

Technical barriers (standards), import licenses and tariffs may be deployed as means of limiting the market access of foreign firms. The present paper examines these measures in a setting of monopolistic competition. We find that, if protection focuses predominantly on the number of foreign...

Economic integration in Europe has had ambiguous effects on industry concentration. The literature has proposed various explanations of the empirical findings. The present paper provides an additional theoretical argument. We show that in a world of monopolistic competition, integration in it...

Contrary to the prevailing interpretation, this paper shows that the central models of trade with heterogeneous firms (<link>Melitz 2003</link>; <link>Bernard et al. 2003</link>) exhibit ambiguous predictions for the exporter productivity premium. This prospect arises because of differences between theoretical and...

Temporary migration, though empirically relevant, is often ignored in formal models. This paper proposes a migration model with heterogeneous agents and persistent cross country income differentials that features temporary migration. In equilibrium there exists a positive relation between the...

The dynamics of export market exit and firm closure have found limited attention in the new heterogeneous-firms trade literature. In fact, several of the predictions on firm survival and exit stemming from this new class of models are at odds with the stylized facts. Empirically, higher...

Trade liberalization comes about through reductions in various types of trade costs. This paper introduces, apart from real variable (i.e. iceberg) and fixed export costs, two partially redistributed tariffs into a Melitz (2003) model. We present comparable results for welfare effects and...

This paper examines the political economy of a selective immigration policy in a model with incomplete information on the characteristics of migrants. We address two questions: First, how does a selective immigration policy affect the number of immigrants which is admitted by the receiving...

This paper investigates the effects of inflows of foreign aid on the debt repayment behaviour of developing countries. The paper first delineates the overall incentives to committing to timely repayment in a war of attrition-type model. A set of panel estimates including 93 developing countries...