There are two independent strands of literature on the geographic distribution of economic activities. One is the new economic geography that emphasizes product diversity, and the other is probabilistic migration that stresses taste heterogeneity in residential location. This article incorporates these two characteristics into a single framework, and analyzes how they affect the number and stab...

The Tiebout hypothesis (residential choice depends solely on local public goods) is extensively applied to explain geographic segregation, and the related literature finds that residents are segregated according to their heterogeneous preferences for public goods. This paper further examines the heterogeneous preferences for private goods in a spatial economy without public goods. Specifically,...

We investigate how the division of aggregate income into per capita income and population affects the margins of imports. In the first part, we use data on imports of 123 countries to document a positive relationship between per capita income and both the extensive and quality margin of imports, for a given level of aggregate GDP. These relations hold at various levels of disaggregation. While ...

Globalization and Labor Market Outcomes: Wage Bargaining, Search Frictions, and Firm Heterogeneity We introduce search unemployment à la Pissarides into Melitz’ (2003) model of trade with heterogeneous firms. We allow wages to be individually or collectively bargained and analytically solve for the equilibrium. We find that the selection effect of trade influences labor market outcomes. Trade l...

We develop a new methodology for measuring management practices in hospitals, and use this in 182 interviews of physicians and managers in public and private hospitals (covering 61% of English acute trusts). We find our management measure is strongly correlated with hospital performance, both clinical outcomes like survival rates from heart attacks, and general operational and financial outcome...

In this paper, we aim at investigating from a game theory perspective whether trade liberalization can promote a collusive intra-industry trade and whether such a collusive trade is always socially desirable compared to the autarchy solution. We show that, under Cournot competition, economic integration is anti-competitive if collusive trade is a possible outcome of the repeated game; under pri...

For a firm without a readily identifiable brand name, quality reputation may solely reflect the country of origin. In this paper we endogenize country-of-origin reputations and show that these selffulfilling reputations determine not only the average quality of a country’s exports but also the type of products in which a country specializes. Hence, the pattern of international trade can be dete...

This paper investigates the effect of Internet technology on how firms access export markets directly or via intermediaries. Empirical evidence suggests that technology diffusion is geographically localised, with knowledge spillovers from neighbouring adopters decaying quickly over short distances. To address the potential endogeneity of Internet adoption, I construct an instrument that capture...

It is often observed that in order to serve the domestic market, foreign firms not only export but also control domestic firms through foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper examines the effects of tariffs, production subsidies, and foreign ownership regulation on prices, outputs, profits, and welfare when both exports and FDI coexist. Cross-border ownership on the basis of both financial ...

Article history: Received 29 June 2013 Received in revised form 18 November 2013 Accepted 19 November 2013 Available online 12 December 2013 Constructing a duopoly model with non-constant marginal costs and a strict Pareto criterion, this paper examines welfare effects of world-price-fixing tariff reductions accompanied by adjustments of a domestic tax. If a destination-based consumption tax is...