Albeit nominal tariffs have been decreasing in the past decades, the rise of global manufacturing along global value chains lead to their accumulation along the international supply chain. From a "trade in tasks" perspective, Effective Protection Rates provide important insights on the impact of...

The debate on “exchange wars and trade wars” is raising the attention of experts on international trade and economics. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the impacts of exchange rate misalignments on one of the most traditional trade policy instruments – tariffs, as defined by...

We develop a method to measure the incidence of monopolistic markup distortions in the global economy. Using semi-parametric formulas, we measure how trade modifies the deadweight loss of markups through two channels: (1) trade-induced change in markup dispersion, and (2) international...

Trade reforms in transition economies are analyzed in a model of trade and vertical product differentiation. We first show that trade liberalization in transition economies reduces the local firm s output and raises the prices of all variants. Second, we find that neither free trade nor the...

This paper focuses on ignored issues regarding the impact of trade reforms in transition economies. These economies are primarily characterized by a low quality of their products, large depreciations of their currencies, and a high degree of government intervention in economic activity. These...

We build a simple theoretical model to understand why developing and transition economieshave increasingly applied anti-dumping laws. To that end, we investigate the strategic incentivesof oligopolistic exporting firms to undertake dumping in these economies. We show that dumpingmay be due to...

We study price discrimination in a monopolistic software market. The monopolist charges different prices for the upgrade version and for the full version. Consumers are heterogeneous in taste for infinitely durable software and there is no resale. We show that price discrimination leads to a...

We study the informational role of prices in a stochastic environment. We provide a closed-form solution of the monopoly problem when the price imperfectly signals quality to the uninformed buyers. We then study the effect of noise on output, market price, information flows, and expected...

We study the informational role of prices in a stochastic environment. We provide a closed-form solution of the monopoly problem when the price imperfectly signals quality to the uninformed buyers. We then study the effect of noise on output, market price, information flows, and expected...

We explain why a durable-goods monopolist would like to create a shortage in the marketplace.We argue that this incentive arises from the presence of a second-hand market and uncertainty about consumers' willingness to pay for the good. Consumers are heterogeneous in their valuations. Moreover,...