In this paper, I investigate welfare gains associated with trade induced intra-firm adjustments of multi-product firms. To disentangle the welfare gains, I split up the R&D portfolio of a multi-product firm into three different channels: i) product innovation, ii) investments in the degree of...

This paper presents empirical evidence about the relationship between market openness and markup distribution of manufacturing firms. The empirical analysis uses a panel data set of Spanish firms in the period 1990-2005, with a structural approach that lets us to identify individual mark-ups....

This paper investigates the relationship between trade liberalisation, consumers' environmental awareness and a negative environmental externality in consumption. We adopt an international Hotelling duopoly setup, where firms are located in two asymmetric countries. We find that, if the...

Using a gravity model, this article presents an analysis of aggregate trade flows aimed at identifying China's impact on Latin America's trade. The results obtained indicate that: i) China´s growth in the last years implied a growing supply of exports to this market from most countries in the...

Over the last 20 years the trade literature repeatedly documented the trade-reducing effects of inter- and intra-national borders. Thereby, the puzzling size and persistence of observed border effects from the beginning raised doubts on the role of underlying political borders. However, when...

This paper identifies a "border" effect in the absence of a border. The finding that trade between East- and West-Japan is 23.1 to 51.3 percent lower than trade within both country parts, is established despite the absence of an obvious east-west division due to historical borders, cultural...

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: estimating economic relationships in logarithms can lead to significant biases in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This paper explains why this problem...

The study aims to analyze the border effects on intra-African trade through the use of a gravity specification based on the monopolistic competition model of trade introduced by Krugman (1980). The study used CEPII data on trade flows between African countries over the period 1980-2006. We...

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

This paper provides an analysis of outsourcing and trade in a spatial model a la Hotelling. In this setting, we discuss the trade-off between transport-cost-related disadvantages and outsourcing-induced production cost advantages of a large economy. The model gives a rich picture of possible...