Does exposure to international trade have a pro-competitive effect on domestic pricing? This paper attends to this question in two stages: first, by developing a simple methodology to test the above proposition by linking domestic pricing behaviour to external competition via a simple mark-up...

This paper provides a simple theoretical model in which a vertically-distorted industry structure is considered in an international setting. Fixed costs, existing in both the final good and intermediate good sectors, result in a bilateral externality. Production as well as equity ownership...

Recognizing goods produced in different sub-regions within a country as distinct differentiated products, we offer new evidence of variety expansion in nation’s export. We decompose Japanese national exports into prefecture sub-regions and construct extensive margins and intensive margins of...

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...

I develop a new theory of marketing costs and introduce it into a model of trade with product differentiation and firm productivity heterogeneity. In this model, a firm enters a market if it makes profits by reaching a single consumer there and pays an increasing marginal cost to access...

Between 1992 and 2002, the Japanese Import Price Index registered a decline of almost 9 percent and Japan entered a period of deflation. We show that much of the correlation between import prices and domestic prices was due to formula biases. Had the IPI been computed using a pure Laspeyres...

During the last two decades, new research has greatly advanced our understanding of the structure of world trade. This article reviews the empirical literature that grew out of this effort, emphasizing the ways in which it relied on theoretical developments.

We develop a theory of multiproduct firms to analyze the effects of globalization on the distributions of firm size, scope, and productivity. Our model explains two puzzles. First, it explains the well-known size-discount puzzle: large firms have lower values of Tobin%u2019s Q than small firms....

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of multi-product firms and analyzes their behavior during trade liberalization. Firm productivity in a given product is modeled as a combination of firm-level "ability" and firm-product-level "expertise", both of which are stochastic and unknown...