We document new facts about the evolution of firm performance and prices in international markets, and propose a theory of firm dynamics emphasizing the interaction between learning about demand and quality choice to explain the observed patterns. Using data from the Portuguese manufacturing...

A distinctive feature of present globalization is the development of international production sharing activities i.e. production fragmentation. The increased importance of fragmentation in world trade has created an interest among trade economists in explaining the determinants of intra-industry...

Within a standard gravity framework I explore the impact of country size and trade liberalisation on extensive and intensive margins of imports across broad categories of goods. This allows testing hypotheses from two distinct strands of the trade literature, i.e., vertical integration versus...

In times of increasing oil prices and a weak dollar, European companies that focus their business on the US market may find themselves in a weak position. While many businesses can hedge this kind of risk by relocating production to the US, or employing financial remedies, these strategies may...

Most trade theories assume bilateral trade relationships are forged on the basis of some comparative advantages, scale considerations, market structure or some productivity advantage of firms. Since these factors change slowly, bilateral trade relationships should be stable. However, we argue...

It has become common to measure the quality of exports using their unit export value (UEV). Applications of this method include studies of intra-industry trade (IIT) and analyses of industrial "competitiveness". This literature seems to assume that export quality and export price (the most...

We analyse the impact of relaxing rules of origin (ROOs) in a simple setting with heterogeneous firms that buy intermediate inputs from domestic and foreign sources. In particular, we consider the impact of switching from bilateral to diagonal cumulation when using preferences (instead of paying...

The home market effect (HME) is commonly defined as a more than proportional supply response to a demand shock. Recent theoretical literature, however, shows that predictions from the traditional twocountry framework do not always survive in multi-country settings. This is because ‘third’...

Az 1992 és 2003 közötti magyarországi vállalati és termékszintû külkereskedelmi adatok felhasználásával megmutatjuk, hogy az import lényegesen nagyobb hatással van a vállalati termelékenységre, mint az, hogy a állalat exportál-e vagy sem. Megfordítva, az is igaz, hogy az...

Corporate organization varies within a country and across countries with country size. The paper starts by establishing some facts about corporate organization based on unique data of 660 Austrian and German corporations. The larger country (Germany) has larger firms with flatter more decentral...