There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the quality content of Chinese exports and to what extent China imposes a threat to the market positions of advanced economies. While China’s export structure is very similar to that of the advanced world, its export unit values are well below...

International relative prices across industrialized countries show large and systematic deviations from relative purchasing power parity. We embed a model of imperfect competition and variable markups in a quantitative model of international trade. We find that when our model is parameterized to...

We evaluate two alternative models of international trade in differentiated products. An increasing returns model where varieties are linked to firms predicts home market effects: increases in a country's share of demand cause disproportionate increases in its share of output. In contrast, a...

Based on the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (H-O-V) theory, the paper develops theoretical models that lead to estimating cross-industry equations in a proper way, when allowing for departures from some of the strong assumptions of the H-O theory, such as perfect competition, equal factor unit...

Multinational firms engage in foreign direct investments to minimize production costs and trade costs. In stead of making foreign direct investment, a firm may find optimal to produce in a periphery region of home country as an export-platform base to minimize these costs. With over 1,000...

This study of the Italian wool-based textile industries (woollens, worsteds, and serges) seeks to examine its rise, expansion, and ultimate decline, over a period of five centuries (from ca. 1200 to ca. 1730) in the context of both international competition and economic conjoncture, in the...

In this paper we study the effect of market structure on the trade performance of South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. We center our analysis on Korea and Taiwan, countries which have very different market structures: Korea has many large, vertically-integrated business groups known as chaebol,...

We examine the sales of French manufacturing firms in 113 destinations, including France itself. Several regularities stand out: (1) the number of French firms selling to a market, relative to French market share, increases systematically with market size; (2) sales distributions are very similar...

This study of the Italian wool-based textile industries (woollens, worsteds, and serges) seeks to examine its rise, expansion, and ultimate decline, over a period of five centuries (from ca. 1200 to ca. 1730) in the context of both international competition and economic conjoncture, in the...

In recent years empirical studies offer clear evidence on the increasing importance of intra-industry trade in presence of vertically differentiated products. These are goods that, within the same industry, are distinguished by different quality levels. In the new trade theory and in the...