This chapter discusses whether and how 'new quantitative trade models' (NQTMs) can be fruitfully applied to quantify the welfare effects of trade liberalization, thus shedding light on the trade-related effects of further European integration. On the one hand, it argues that NQTMs have indeed the potential of being used to supplement traditional ‘computable general equilibrium’ (CGE) analysis t...

Since the seminal work of Krugman (1979), product variety has played a central role in models of trade and growth. In spite of the general use of love-of-variety models, there has been no systematic study of how the import of new varieties has contributed to national welfare gains in the United States. In this paper we show that the unmeasured growth in product variety from US imports has been ...

Costa and Carvalho make a compelling case for the practical utility of barcoding fish. Essentially the barcode, the precise sequence of a carefully chosen few hundred base pairs of a mitochondrial gene found in all eukaryotes, is intended as a defini taxonomic criterion that can be added to the existing description of a species, but that has the enormous advantage of being applicable to any par...

I develop a quantitative trade model with endogenous production networks, namely the collection of supplier-customer relationships among rms. In the model, rms form linkages with each other both within and across borders, balancing the tradeo between extra revenue brought in by downstream connections and xed costs required to establish these relationships. The structure of equilibrium productio...

In a New-Keynesian sticky-price model, we study how the gains from commitments depend on their horizon and credibility. Continuously committing just one period ahead captures all the gains available for any strictly positive level of credibility, unless policymakers themselves exclude deviations, in which case a relatively high credibility is required just to capture the majority of these. The ...

The Danish hospital sector faces a major rebuilding program to centralize activity in fewer and larger hospitals. We aim to conduct an efficiency analysis of hospitals and to estimate the potential cost savings from the planned hospital mergers. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate a cost frontier. Based on this analysis, we calculate an efficiency score for each hospital and esti...