This paper provides a new theory for two-sided payment card markets. Adopting payment cards requires consumers and merchants to pay a fixed cost, but yields a lower marginal cost of making payments. Analyzing adoption and usage externalities among heterogeneous consumers and merchants, our...

In recent years, two important related developments have transformed the nature of world trade: the explosive growth of Chinese trade, and the growth of vertically specialized trade due to international production fragmentation. The literature in each of these two separate topics is large and...