Newspapers are two-sided platforms that sell their product both to readers and advertisers. Media firms in general, and newspapers in particular, are considered important providers of information, culture and language in most countries. Newspapers are therefore given preferential tax treatment....

This paper discusses the influence of public ownership on trade policy instruments. We demonstrate three important invariance results. First, the degree of public ownership affects neither the level of socially optimal activities nor welfare if the government chooses optimal trade policy...

This paper develops an oligopolistic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D to examine how trade liberalization affects firm and industry productivity, as well as social welfare. We identify four effects of trade liberalization on productivity: (i) a direct...

This paper deals with the behavior of fair trade organizations in an oligopolistic setting in which the vertically integrated fair trade firm produces a commodity which is a weak substitute for another commodity. ProÞt-maximizing oligopolists are vertically disintegrated and produce for both...

This note generalizes the frequently used Hotelling model for two-sided markets. We demonstrate an invariance theorem: advertisement levels neither depend on the media price nor on the location of the media firm. An increase in advertising revenues does not change location but only the media...

Since Dixit (1984), it is well accepted that a home country's best policy is to ban imports in an oligopolistic market if the resulting monopoly has a cost advantage over imports. This note (i) provides a formal proof and (ii) extends this result to symmetric firms. When domestic instruments are...

This paper models competition among multinational firms in an environment of firm heterogeneity, incomplete cost information and strategic interaction. In this context, FDI serves as a signal of productivity: when firms sort into exporters and multinationals, they also show whether they have low...

Except for the famous Dornbusch-Fischer-Samuelson (DFS) models, most general equilibrium models of trade rely on factor price equalization. The DFS models demonstrate the gains from trade without factor price equalization under perfect competition. This paper employs a general equilibrium model...

This paper investigates the optimal acquisition strategy of a foreign investor, who wants to acquire one out of two local firms, under incomplete information. The response to acquisition offers is also a signal on firm productivity, affecting future competition. We identify a competition effect...