This paper uses a unique micro-level data-set on Chinese firms to test for the existence of a 'political-pecking order' in the allocation of credit. Our findings are threefold. Firstly, private Chinese firms are credit constrained while State-owned firms and foreign-owned firms in China are not;...

Recent theoretical work on economic geography emphasizes the interplay of transport costs and plant-level increasing returns. In these models, the spatial distribution of demand is a key determinant of economic outcomes. In one strand, it is argued that higher demand gives rise to a more than...

Using data on name distributions in 95 French departments observed from 1946 to 2002, we investigate spatial and social mechanisms behind the transmission of parental preferences. Drawing inspiration from recent work on social interactions, we develop a simple discrete choice model that predicts...

We identify in this Paper the level of trade integration between the three largest economic powers of the world, often called the Triad: The United States, the EU and Japan. We focus on measuring possible asymmetries in market access between members of the Triad using border effects between each...

McCallum (1995) shows in an influential contribution that, even when controlling for the impact of bilateral distance and region size, borders sharply reduce trade volumes between countries. We use in this Paper data on bilateral trade flows between 94 French regions, for 10 industries and two...

This paper provides evidence on the long-term impact of market potential on economic development. It derives from the New Economic Geography literature a structural estimation where the level of factors' income of a country is related to its export capacity, labelled Market Access (MA) by...

Knickerbocker (1973) introduced ‘oligopolistic reaction’ to explain why firms follow rivals into foreign markets. We develop a model that incorporates central features of Knickerbocker's story-oligopoly, uncertainty, and risk aversion-to establish the conditions required to generate...

The majority of independent nations today were part of empires in 1945. Using bilateral trade data from 1948 to 2006, we examine the effect of independence on post-colonial trade. On average, there is little short run effect of trade with the colonizer (metropole). However, after three decades...

This paper analyzes empirically the effect of spatial agglomeration of activities on the productivity of firms using French individual firm data from 1996 to 2004. This allows us to control for endogeneity biases that the estimation of agglomeration economies typically encounters. French firms...

This paper analyses theoretically and empirically the relationship between trade and war. We show that the intuition that trade promotes peace is only partially true even in a model where trade is beneficial to all, war reduces trade and leaders take into account the costs of war. When war can...