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...

We investigate the introduction of a minimum quality standard in a vertically differentiated duopoly where production is polluting. We examine the alternative frameworks with quality-dependent fixed or variable costs, under both price and quantity competition. Under Bertrand behaviour, the...

The variety and quality of products has a great importance in the analysis of international trade flows. Several theoretical models show that larger and richer economies produce and export goods characterized by higher variety and quality. Accordingly, empirical studies have tried to quantify...

Alchian and Allen hypothesized that a country will export high rather than low quality goods. Here we show that if the inherent attributes of the commodities are identical the country will only export the high-quality good.

With the emergence of North-South intra-industry trade in products where consumers value quality, exporting countries potentially face significant barriers to entry. Due to the existence of asymmetric information about new products in a foreign market, the producer's reputation becomes an...