We develop a two-sector model of monopolistic competition with a differentiated intermediate good and variable elasticity of technological substitution. This setting proves to be well-suited to studying the nature and origins of external increasing returns. We disentangle two sources of scale...

We consider the plant location decision of a multinational, which has the option to invest in a more or aless technologically advanced country. We find that in the absence of exporting by the local firms, themultinational will invest in the country lagging behind, unless the firms in that...

In this paper, we undertake an in-depth inquiry into the nature of sharing externalities, and study how they affect the market outcome. We show that the key thing for understanding sharing externalities is the interplay between two forces: the specialization/complexity effect, on the one hand,...

Production runs suffer from inadvertent quality variation. There are good apples; there are bad apples (also known as “seconds”). The Alchian-Allen theorem states that a common per-unit charge on two goods differentiated only by quality, increases the relative export demand for the higher...

The dominance of English language content on the Internet raises a question of how consumer bilingualism in a given country affects the amount of home language content and the country's welfare. We address this question by studying two-sided market competition between a foreign and a domestic...

We present a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition featuring pro-competitive effects and a competitive limit, and investigate the impact of trade on welfare and efficiency. Contrary to the constant elasticity case, in which all gains from trade are due to product diversity, our...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...

Services form an increasing proportion of the inputs used in manufacturing. We explore empirically whether competition in the service sector affects downstream manufacturing firms' efficiency, via the inputs used. Using French micro-data for services, we calculate proxies for competition in...

Import competition from China is pervasive in the sense that for many good categories, the competitive environment that US firms face in these markets is strongly driven by the prices of Chinese imports, and so is their pricing decision. This paper quantifies the effect of the...

This paper quantifies the effect of the government-controlled appreciation of the Chinese renminbi (RMB) vis-à-vis the USD from 2005 to 2008 on the prices charged by US producers. As the RMB during that time was pegged to a basket of currencies, the empirical strategy must account for the fact...