This paper examines the various economic issues on offshoring (international outsourcing). It begins with a discussion of the factors that determine a firm's decision to offshore and illustrates, with simple models, the cost saving of offshoring certain stages of production and the advantages of...

This paper provides a concise guide to dynamic optimization with an integral treatment on various optimal control and dynamic programming problems. It presents essential theorems and methods for obtaining and characterizing solutions to these problems. The paper discusses Pontryagin's maximum...

China has been touted as a unique success story in development economics. The world financial crisis of 2007--2010 impacted China severely. Its GDP growth slowed, corporate debts piled up, equity markets became volatile, the renminbi weakened, and its forex reserves shrank in the face of capital...

We prove that the normalization rule in Bond and Syropoulos (1996, Journal of International Economics 40, 411-437) that sets the world price of good 1 as the numéraire causes asymmetry in the Nash equilibrium. Such rule contradicts their symmetric assumption when one derives other blocs'...

The paper introduces the conjectural variations and bargaining approaches into a vertical model, wherein a foreign upstream firm supplies one input to two downstream firms that produce differentiated products for the export market. Various downstream firms' competition modes and upstream's...

We show that in an n×n tridiagonal matrix T that has a positive dominant diagonal and negative super- and sub-diagonals, there exists a strictly positive x0 that satisfies the system Tx=b, b≧0 and b≠0. Furthermore, if T is symmetric, the components of x can be ranked under certain...

The objective of this paper is to find the key factors that affect a firm's optimal transfer pricing policy. It examines two minimalist vertical models -- one consisting of a vertically integrated firm monopolizing an intermediate input for its own and rival's downstream division, and the other...

A theoretical analysis of international trade and industrial policy, developing and using new models of trade with imperfect competition. Modeling of imperfect competition within international trade has been difficult until recent breakthroughs in this area, which have provided a more realistic...