We study the make-or-buy decision of oligopolistic firms in an industry in which final good production requires specialized inputs. Firms' mode of operation decision depends on both the incentive to economize on costs and on strategic considerations. We explore the strategic incentives to...

This paper analyses characteristics of the recent explosion of patent filings by Chinese firms both domestically and in the United States. We construct a firm-level dataset by matching USPTO and SIPO patents to Chinese manufacturing census data for 1999-2006. Using this integrated dataset we...

Japan's mid 19th century transition from 200 years of self-imposed autarky to open trade is the main success story of East Asian integration into the world economy during the first wave of globalization (1850-1914). This article reviews the economic, institutional and normative changes within...

I propose a framework that takes a set of conceivable outcomes as the primitive and a prediction is defined by identifying a subset on the set of conceivable outcomes. This notion of predictability serves as an organizing principle for characterizing pattern of trade predictions in single...

Trade liberalization in environmental goods is high on the agenda of the current Doha round. We examine its effects in a model with one domestic downstream polluting firm and two upstream firms (one domestic, one foreign). The domestic government sets the emission tax rate after the outcome of...

This paper addresses Choi and Krishna's (2004) recent empirical test of a bilateral factor content of trade prediction, originally developed by Helpman (1984). I revisit the theory and show that, contrary to common belief, Helpman's paper does not generalize Brecher and Choudhri's 2-country...

While the brief experiment with redistributing antidumping duty revenue to import competing firms (via the Byrd Amendment) will soon be over, interest remains in how such a mechanism affects the strategic incentives of the firms involved. In this paper we use a simple two-period duopoly model...

We examine research and development (R&D) policies when a national firm forms an R&D alliance with a foreign competitor. Firms differ in their R&D capabilities, and adopt a profit-sharing rule when R&D decisions are coordinated. National R&D tax/subsidy policies are set independently or...

We exploit Japan’s 19th century move from autarky to free trade to provide the first test of the general validity of the price formulation of the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem. In this formulation a country's autarky factor price vector imposes a single refutable prediction on the economy’s factor...

In this paper we analyse the impact of changes in product market competition on wage outcomes in the presence of an open shop union. With less than full union membership, product market competition is shown to affect not only a unionised firm's profits but also its payoff in the event of a...