Developing countries pay substantially higher transportation costs than developed nations, which leads to less trade and perhaps lower incomes. This paper investigates price discrimination in the shipping industry and the role it plays in determining transportation costs. In the presence of...

This thesis includes three essays. Essay 1 extends the Dixit-Stiglitz (1977) model of monopolistic competition by relaxing the assumption of a single technology. The main objective is to study whether the equivalence of the monopolistically competitive equilibrium to the social optimum still...