This paper shows that subsidy competition may be efficiency enhancing. We model a subsidy game among two asymmetric regions in a new trade model, where capital can freely move among regions, but capital rewards are repatriated. We study subsidy competition, starting from an equilibrium where the...

This paper analyzes competition for capital between welfare-maximizing gov- ernments in a framework with agglomeration tendencies and asymmetric union- ization. We find that a unionized country's government finds it optimal to use tax policy to induce industry to relocate towards a location with...

This paper assesses the agglomeration pattern of four-digit industries in Germany using a rich data set on the population of German firms. To identify geographical agglomeration, we follow the distance based approach of Duranton and Overman (2005) and find that the location pattern of 78% of our...

Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

This paper explores the effects of trade liberalization envisioned in a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. We use a new quantitative spatial trade model with consumptive and productive uses of land and inputoutput linkages. Our...