This paper explores the role played by product variety and quality in a real business cycle model. Firms are heterogeneous in terms of their specific quality as well as pro- ductivity levels. Firms which have costly technology enter in a period of high aggregated demand and produce high quality...

The Klein-Leffler model explains how the benefit of future reputation can induce firms to produce high quality experience goods, either in a monopoly or an industry with competing firms. We show that reputation can be leveraged across products, but only by a firm with a monopoly on at least one...

We consider a dynamic voluntary advertising model with a duopoly. Firms can use advertising and price as competitive tools where product quality is a given and the market is not fully covered by consumers. Advertising also plays a role as a public good. In this situation, we investigate how...

In this paper I try to analyse the impact of environmental policies in the presence of eco-labelling on the wage level and production levels. For this I start with a general equilibrium framework where a country produces two traded goods using labour and capital, one of which pollutes when...

The effects of entry on consumer and total welfare are studied in a model of consumer search. Potential entrants differ in quality, with high-quality sellers being more likely to meet consumer needs. Contrary to the standard view in economics that more entry benefits consumers, we find that...

Exporter wage premium has been widely studied in the literature on international trade. The aim of this paper is analyze whether there is also a producer quality wage premium at firm level, and if so, analyze whether its origin is similar to the exporter wage premium. In other words, I test...

We investigate the dynamic relationship between advertising and product quality under duopolistic competition. By using a simplified vertical product differentiation model with voluntary advertising, we show that the firm with larger market share has a larger advertising share and that there is...

Retrospective studies of horizontal mergers have focused on their price effects, leaving the important question of how mergers affect product quality largely unanswered. This paper empirically investigates this issue for two recent airline mergers: Delta/Northwest and Continental/United....

In the paper we focus on emerging market economies’ pattern of trade, with a view to explaining the different features of competitiveness for high skill- and low skill-intensive firms. We consider a theoretical dynamical setup where high-skill firms engage in innovation activity and gain...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...