Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by Helpman (1998) and Hanson (1998). The advantage of the Helpman-Hanson model is that it incorporates the fact that agglomeration of economic activity increases the prices of local (non-tradable) services, like housing. This model thereby provides an intuitively appealing spreading f...

The standard firm heterogeneity model of FDI considers the case whole ownership foreign affiliates. However, there exist many partially-owned This paper builds a based on Helpman et al. (2004) to allow various structures and posits some testable hypotheses relationship between productivity shares/structures. empirical part corroborates these hypotheses, showing that high firms tend have higher ...

In this paper, I analyze recent findings by Coe and Helpman (1995) of trade-related international R&D spillovers. I show generally that randomly created bilateral trade shares also give rise to large estimated international R&D spillovers; often, in fact, to larger estimated spillover effects which are more precisely estimated than by employing the ’true’ bilateral trade shares. This casts some...

This study applies median voter theorem and special interest politics to explain the setting of cigarette tax rates in the 48 states of the United States between 19962000. We measure median voter’s preferences and political influence of special interest groups using CPS Tobacco Use Supplements and data from National Institute on Money in State Politics (NIMSP). Based on a theoretical framework ...

This paper explores the interplay between commodities’ transportation costs and workers’ commuting costs within a general equilibrium framework à la Dixit-Stiglitz. Workers are mobile and choose a region where to work as well as an intraurban location where to live. We show that a more integrated economy need not be more agglomerated. Instead, low transportation costs lead to the dispersion of ...

I N the last decade, the application of gravity models enjoyed a big revival. This was not so much driven by its more rigorous theoretical foundation (Anderson, 1979; Bergstrand, 1985, 1989 and 1990; Helpman and Krugman, 1985; and Helpman, 1987, etc.) but by the opportunity to project bilateral trade relations (see Wang and Winters, 1991; Hamilton and Winters, 1992; Baldwin, 1994; and successor...

to demonstrate more visibly the close relation between thecontinuity and integrability, a new proof for the banach-zareckitheorem is presented on the basis of the radon-nikodym theoremwhich emphasizes on measure-type properties of the lebesgueintegral. the banach-zarecki theorem says that a real-valuedfunction $f$ is absolutely continuous on a finite closed intervalif and only if it is continuo...

This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organizations. We use quantile and quantile IV regressions to do so using the data from Gawande and Bandyopadhyay (2000). Surprisingly, the results do not provide any evidence favoring the PFS model. ...