Traditional analyses of standards in international trade identify standards as government regulations and investigate the potential for distortion of trade flows. In reality, however, private industry groups exercise critical influence on the determination of technical standards. The composition...

Import competition from China is pervasive in the sense that for many good categories, the competitive environment that US firms face in these markets is strongly driven by the prices of Chinese imports, and so is their pricing decision. This paper quantifies the effect of the...

We investigate theoretically and empirically the competitive effects of increased trade on prices, productivity and markups. Using disaggregated data for EU manufacturing over the period 1988-2000 we find increased openness exerts a negative and significant impact on sectoral prices. Increased...

We construct a model where the equilibrium organization of firms changes as an economy approaches the world technology frontier. In vertically integrated firms, owners (managers) have to spend time both on production and innovation activities, and this creates managerial overload, and...

This paper investigates the role of the exchange rate regime in the process of trade adjustment, by examining the relationship between trade prices and exchange rate regimes. The theoretical framework is a dynamic one à la Froot-Klemperer (1989). The empirical investigation takes advantage of...

The pattern of trade observed from firm-product-country data calls for a new generation of models. To address the unexplained variation in the data, we propose a new model of monopolistic competition where varieties enter preferences non-symmetrically, capturing both horizontal and vertical...

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...

Using a new and extensive micro data set we investigate the impact of a change in international competitive pressure following a real exchange shock on multi-product firms’ product mix. We only find weak evidence for the core competencies hypothesis, according to which, we would expect the...

This paper surveys recent work on competition in markets in which consumers face costs to switching between competing firms' products, even when all firms' products are functionally identical. I address issues in macroeconomics, international trade and industrial organization: In a market with...

The impact of exchange rate fluctuations on international trade has long been a major concern for policy-makers. This is particularly the case in Europe, where countries trade extensively with each other. The crisis that began in the Summer of 1992 generated increased exchange rate fluctuations...