The paper provides a general-equilibrium model where incomplete international financial markets lead to insufficient industrial specialization and low international trade. As international portfolio diversification is limited and productivity is uncertain, investors wish to maintain a...

The paper investigates whether deviations from the law of one price can attributed to real factors, such as transportation and distribution costs. Even if trade is costly, the prices of a good at di.erent locations will be linked as long as the good is traded. Instead of the usual iceberg...

One of the major tasks facing a transition economy is to create the competitive environment of a properly functioning market economy. It is widely believed that competition has a positive effect on efficiency, but the theoretical and empirical support is quite scarce. The objective of this paper...

All economies are heterogeneous. The behavior of the economic agents with different in important aspects. However, in a stable environment usually strong forces shape a typical behavior, thus many agents act similarly. On the one hand, the behavior of agents will be much less uniform in an...

This paper investigates the link between competition and efficiency for the Hungarian corporate sector during various phases of the transition process. We employ frontier production functions to explore differences among groups of firms, and to identify the typical adjustment process of each...

Under perfect competition and constant returns to scale, firms producing homogeneous products set their prices at their marginal costs which also equal their average costs. However, the departure from these standard assumptions has important implications with respects to the derived theoretical...

What is the effect of imports on productivity? To answer this question, we estimate a structural model of producers using product-level import data for a panel of Hungarian manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2001. In our model with heterogenous firms, producers choose to import or purchase...