This paper studies tax competition in a setting that allows for agglomeration economies and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves the large country charging a higher tax than the small nation, with this rate being too low from a social point of view. Tighter integration...

The paper uses long-run GDP data for developed countries drawn from Maddison (2003) to generate deviation cycles for the period from 1870 to 2001. The cyclical deviates are examined for their bilateral cross-correlation values in three separate periods, those of the first globalization wave...

There is increasing empirical evidence that vertical product differentiation is an important determinant of international trade. However, the economic literature so far has solely focused on the case in which quality trade stems from differences between countries. No studies investigate the role...

The aim of this paper is to study the spatial selection of firms once it is recognized that heterogeneous firms typically choose different locations in respond to market integration of regions having different sizes. Specifically, we show that decreasing trade costs leads to the gradual...

This paper studies the intranational business cycle - that is the set of regional (prefecture) business cycles - in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series and relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to identify...

This paper compares two policies: trade cost reduction and firm relocation cost reduction using a three-country version of a heterogeneous-firms economic geography model, where the three countries have different market (population) size. We show how the effects of the two policies differ, in...

In an economic geography model with firm heterogeneity, Baldwin and Okubo (2006) show that regional policies for promoting periphery development attract low-productivity firms and adversely affect the productivity gap within a country. This paper empirically examines their theoretical prediction...

This paper argues about some missing aspects of intra-industry trade (IIT) and proposes some alternative measures to better capture the nature of IIT. We show the over-time evolution of the number of IIT products, and propose an index which captures the share of the number of IIT products over...

We explore the effects of environmental and trade policies with negative consumption externalities when a domestic firm and a foreign rival produce imperfect substitutes and compete in the domestic market. Consumption of the foreign product generates more emissions than that of the domestic...

This paper studies anti-agglomeration subsidies in a core-periphery setting when firms are heterogeneous in labour productivity, focusing on the effects of relocation subsidy on firm location in various tax-financing schemes (local versus global). We discuss how subsidy can enhance welfare in...