We extend the Benassy (1996) 'taste for variety' model to an open economy setting. With the Benassy effect, the market equilibrium is inefficient, openness reduces the varieties provided in the unconstrained optimum and there are potential gains from international coordination.

This paper offers a new mechanism to explain de-industrialisation in response to a price increase of the manufactured good. In our trade model, one sector (agriculture) is perfectly competitive while the other (manufacturing) is monopolistically competitive. Both industries use skilled and...

The declining labor share in national income and rising inequality over the last four decades raise questions about causes of these trends. In order to explain these trends, we develop a theoretical model that links intra-industry distribution of wages to variation in market power of firms. The...

The recent availability of trade data at a firm-product-country level calls for a new generation of models able to exploit the large variability detected across observations. By developing a model of monopolistic competition in which varieties enter preferences non-symmetrically, we show how...

This paper studies the market and welfare effects of income heterogeneity in monopolistically competitive product markets in the context of nonhomothetic preferences. In a closed economy, where richer individuals' expenditures are less sensitive to price change compared to poorer ones', a...

Many trade models of monopolistic competition identify cost efficiency as the main determinant of firm performance in export markets. To date, the analysis of demand factors has received much less attention. We propose a new model where consumer preferences are asymmetric across varieties and...

We develop a two-sector general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition featuring nonhomothetic production and a variable demand elasticity for the manufactured goods. An increase in the relative price of manufacturing varieties can lead to a decline in total industrial output in our...

Based on a many-industry Chamberlinian-Ricardian trade model with iceberg trade costs, this note examines the impact of two modes of economic integration: a reduction in trade costs, and technical standardization due to information spillover. It is shown that these two modes of economic...

The declining labor share in national income and rising inequality over the last four decades raise questions about causes of these trends. In order to explain these trends, we develop a theoretical model that links intra-industry distribution of wages to variation in market power of firms. The...

The paper develops a two-country monopolistic competition model of trade featuring country-specific consumer tastes. The accounting for heterogeneity in tastes is achieved by assuming different elasticities of substitution in the CES utility function for different country consumers. The proposed...