o ne of the effective strategies for economic development of clusters is the conduct of networking activities by cluster members. indeed, the majority of cluster members are micro and small enterprises, so, should attempt to overcome their inherent constraints and influence the market through networking activities. in addition, these enterprises lack an intra-firm research and development unit ...

t his paper investigates the asymmetric behavior of inflation. we use logistic smooth transition autoregressive (lstar) model to characterize the regime-switching behavior of iran’s monthly inflation during the period may 1990 to december 2013. we find that there is a triple relationship between the inflation level, its fluctuations and persistence. the findings imply that the behavior of infla...

abstract i n this paper, we investigate the existence and the nature of real exchange rate misalignment in organization of the petroleum exporting countries (opec). to do this we estimated a cross country basic real exchange rate determination model for 1990-2012 and extracted historic trend of misalignment. the results imply that all opec countries have had misalignment -of different kinds tho...

Transportation costs are of central importance in the New Economic Geography literature, though assumptions about transportation costs continue to be simplistic. This paper begins to address these simplifications by assuming that transportation costs for manufactured goods are heterogeneous. Basic results are consistent with standard models showing dispersion of economic activity for high trans...

This paper sets up a two country monopolistic competition model with intra-industry trade to study the effects of an exogenous differential in wage and social policies on the location of industry. Two model scenarios are considered. In the traditional one with physical capital, such a differential induces a relocation effect which increases with the level of trade integration. The ‘new economic...

We examine the effects of mergers and internal groups (lobbies) in shaping national policies towards foreign direct investment. Lobbying is modeled following the political contributions approach. In this work we develop a partial equilibrium model of an oligopolistic industry in which a number of domestic and foreign firms compete in the market for a homogeneous good in a host country. It is as...

This paper analyses the scope for collusive behaviour within the context of an international duopoly supergame in which both firms and monopoly labour unions interact strategically. We find that the presence of unions, implying an endogenisation of production costs, dramatically alters the incentives for inter-firm collusion. There are, however, strong incentives for the unions to collude, rais...

This paper studies the role of land as a factor of production in a simple monopolistic competition model of trade and geography. Overall we find that land for production is a powerful dispersion force. More specifically, we show that, in contrast to the new trade literature, a larger country will have lower wages, in general. Moreover, allowing for labor mobility, we show that agglomeration is ...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tariff cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tariff reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage point decrease in tariff rates can lead to total factor productivity gains of up to 2 percent. The d...

Departing from explanations that involve either altruistic or political motivations of donors, we link a donor’s willingness to give aid to economic incentives and returns. Since targeted aid might increase the returns from trade and FDI linkages for donors, there exists a non-altruistic basis for helping poor countries. We explore this idea by developing a two-country dynamic strategic interac...