Recent rounds of GATT and later WTO have advocated widespread tariffication, meaning that existing non-tariff barriers be converted into import equivalent tariffs. From an economic point of view, the effects of such tariffication are not entirely clear. The paper presents a general equilibrium...

Recent rounds of GATT and later WTO have advocated widespread tariffication, meaning that existing non-tariff barriers be converted into import equivalent tariffs. From an economic point of view, the effects of such tariffication are not entirely clear. The paper presents a general equilibrium...

Recent literature on the workhorse model of intra-industry trade has explored heterogeneous cost structures at the firm level. These approaches have proven to add realism and predictive power. This paper shows, however, that this added realism also implies that there may exist a positive...

Actual trade and tariff policy prefers ad valorem tariffs to specific tariffs. Yet in this paper we show that, in a setting of monopolistic competition, realizing a given restriction on imports via a specific tariff would generate more consumer utility than obtaining the same restriction via an...

We model a two-country bargaining process over the coordination of a horizontally differentiated product standard. We show that the necessary conditions for bargaining to take place are (i) firm heterogeneity and (ii) sufficiently high complying costs. When firms compete à la Cournot in the...