This paper questions whether the overseas expansion of a country’s retailers fosters overall bilateral exports towards these host markets. To address this question, we consider an empirical trade model, where the foreign sales of multinational retailers reduce the fixed and variable trade...

This paper questions whether the overseas expansion of a country's retailers fosters overall bilateral exports towards these host markets. To address this question, we consider an empirical trade model, where the foreign sales of multinational retailers reduce the fixed and variable trade costs...

Trade unit values are commonly used as proxies for trade prices in empirical research in international economics. Existing datasets providing international trade unit values for a large number of countries typically suffer from a number of statistical biases, due to the aggregation of unit...

Trade unit values are commonly used as proxies for trade prices in empirical research in international economics. Existing datasets providing international trade unit values for a large number of countries typically suffer from a number of statistical biases, due to the aggregation of unit...

In this paper, we estimate firm-level markups and test some micro-level predictions of a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous markups. Our theoretical framework is an extended version of the Melitz and Ottaviano (2008) (MO) model that features both quality and...

Competitiveness has come to the forefront of the policy debate within the European Union, focusing on price competitiveness and intra-EU imbalances. But how to measure competitiveness properly, beyond price or cost competitiveness, remains an open methodological issue; and how can we explain the...

In 2005 the French government launched a policy of competitiveness clusters, giving subsidies for innovative projects managed locally and collectively by firms, research centers and universities. This paper proposes an ex-ante analysis of the outcome of the selection process that took place...

Influential empirical work by Rauch and Trindade (REStat, 2002) finds that Chinese ethnic networks of the magnitude observed in Southeast Asia increase bilateral trade by at least 60%. We argue that this estimate is upward biased due to omitted variable bias. Moreover, it is partly related to a...