This paper develops a method to measure difficulties in market access over a large set of countries (both developing and developed) and industries, during the period 1980-2006. We use a micro-founded heterogeneous-consumers model to estimate the impact of national borders on global and regional...

This paper shows that moving from market segmentation to market integration (i.e. firms can no longer discriminate among markets) may have anti-competitive effects in a repeated game setting in which a simple trigger strategy is the enforcement strategy. In particular, we show that two countries...

Power market integration is analyzed in a two countries model with nationally regulated firms and costly public funds. If generation costs between the two countries are too similar negative business-stealing outweighs efficiency gains so that following integration welfare decreases in both...

We analyze recent contributions to growth theory based on the model of expanding variety of Romer (1990). In the first part, we present different versions of the benchmark linear model with imperfect competition. These include the 'labequipment' model, labor-for-intermediates' and 'directed...

This paper studies the incentives that developing countries have to protect intellectual properties rights (IPR). On the one hand, free-riding on rich countries technology reduces their investment cost in R&D. On the other hand, firm that violates IPR cannot legally export in a country that...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

As cross-border movements of goods, capital, and labor are intensifying, it is likely that goods markets in East Asia will become increasingly integrated. This study investigates the current state of goods market integration in East Asia by measuring the extent of cross-border price...

(Why) do prices and inflation rates differ within the euro area? We study the relevance of a national border for grocery prices in the otherwise homogenous and highly integrated border region of Austria and Germany. Using transaction data on prices and quantities from a large household panel, we...

Trade economists traditionally study the effect of lower variable trade costs. While increasingly important politically, technical barriers to trade (TBTs) have received less attention. Viewing TBTs as fixed regulatory costs related to the entry into export markets, we use a model with...