We investigate the factors that, in addition to preferences, aect the extent to which richer households pay more for a given durable good with respect to their expenditures on nondurables, dened as the quality slope. We show theoretically and conrm empirically that the quality slope decreases in...

We show theoretically and confirm empirically that domestic productivity has a significant impact on the demand for foreign varieties under the assumption that domestic and foreign varieties are imperfect substitutes. In particular, the demand for imported varieties is more elastic for countries...

Our paper advances the previous literature on the relationship between electoral systems and trade protection in several ways. First, our paper is the first to incorporate disaggregated, productlevel data in a crosscountry study. We find that prior crosscountry results, based on national average...

Models with constant-elasticity of substitution (CES) preferences are commonly employed in the international trade literature because they provide a tractable way to handle product differentiation in general equilibrium. However this tractability comes at the cost of generating a set of...

We investigate the effect of credit constraints on the growth of exports at the micro level. We develop a model showing credit constraints play a key role in early stages of exporting, but not in later stages. Our empirical results using product level data on exports to twelve European Union...

This paper examines how the quality of exports depends on relative country size and its remoteness. Specific transportation cost is the key variable in our analysis as it gives rise to the Alchian-Allen effect. In the model, we allow for endogenous quality choice by a producer serving many...

We report the results of an experiment designed to study the role of institutional structure in the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets. In a setting employing double auctions and call markets as trading institutions, bubbles and crashes are a quite robust phenomenon....

Developing countries pay substantially higher transportation costs than developed nations, which leads to less trade and perhaps lower incomes. This paper investigates price discrimination in the shipping industry and the role it plays in determining transportation costs. In the presence of...

We examine international markups and pricing in a generalized version of an "ideal variety" model. In this model, entry causes crowding in variety space, so that the marginal utility of new varieties falls as market size grows. Crowding is partially offset by income effects, as richer consumers...