Cultural allegiances whether inherited, imposed or chosen, affect economic activity. Many of these cultural layers – ethnic background, religion, language, ideological orientation, and artistic interests – spill over national boundaries. Cultural ideas travel the world along many routes from...

In this chapter I explain an innovative modeling approach that incorporates services, foreign direct investment (FDI) and endogenous productivity effects from services. I begin with a small stylized model to help understand the fundamental economics. The model shows that services liberalization...

Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

We develop a two-country general equilibrium model where firms make separate choices about the location of R&D and high-tech production. There are two agglomeration forces: R&D spillovers and backward linkages associated with high-tech production. The latter tends to attract production to the...

In this paper the structure of intra-firm trade within the context of transfer price manipulation by a multinational firm is endogenized. "High" and "low" values of host-country tax rates give rise to intra-firm trade in final goods and intermediate inputs, and "intermediate" values of the tax...

We develop a property-rights model of the firm in which production entails a continuum of uniquely sequenced stages. In each stage, a final-good producer contracts with a distinct supplier for the procurement of a customized stage-specific component. Our model yields a sharp characterization for...

This paper uses a heterogeneousfirms model to examine the procompetitive channel through which FDI affects national welfare. The model shows that the country from which FDI originates experiences a welfare gain following liberalization. However, a counterintuitive finding is that the welfare of...

We develop a matching model of foreign direct investment to study how multinational firms choose between greenfield investment, acquisitions and joint ownership. Firms must invest in a continuum of tasks to bring a product to market. Each firm possesses a core competency in the task space, but...

This paper studies the extensive and intensive margins of firms' global sourcing decisions. We develop a quantifiable multi-country sourcing model in which heterogeneous firms self-select into importing based on their productivity and country-specific variables. The model delivers a simple...

How do changes in competitive intensity affect trade patterns? Some cartels may find it advantageous to eliminate cross-hauling and divide markets geographically. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment associated with increased antitrust enforcement to determine if market division strategies were...