Despite the fact that importing and exporting are extremely rare firm activities, economists generally devote little attention to the role of firms when discussing international trade. This paper summarizes key differences between trading and non-trading firms, demonstrates how these differences...

We extend the model by Krugman (1980) to a multi-country set-up and show that the ‘home-market effect’ highlighted with two countries does not readily extend to such a general setting. In particular, we prove that the most important result, namely the disproportionate causation from demand...

This paper estimates a structural model of economic geography using cross-country data on per capita income, bilateral trade, and the relative price of manufacturing goods. More than 70% of the variation in per capita income can be explained by the geography of access to markets and to sources...

This paper tackles the issue of the optimality of agglomeration in a two-region economy with skilled/mobile and unskilled/immobile workers. The market leads to the optimal outcome when transport costs are high or low. However, for intermediate values, it yields agglomeration whereas dispersion...

This paper tests whether trade in new goods is partially responsible for the pro-trade effects of the euro and provides a measure of the size of the effect. It works with a very large data set (about 16 million observations) covering twenty countries at the most disaggregated level of trade data...

This paper investigates the possibility of endogenous fluctuations in the international distribution of economic activities in the presence of increasing returns, monopolistic competition, trade and convex adjustment costs without allowing for any local productive externalities. Using a...

This Paper presents firm level evidence on the dynamics of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

This Paper discusses a number of issues in the context of the debate on intellectual property in less developed countries (LDCs). It starts by discussing the consequences of IP enforcement in LDCs for global innovation and welfare in poorer countries. It then considers the costs and benefits of...

This paper modifies the heterogenous firms and trade model by Melitz (2003) by explicitly modelling the entry cost of a firm in a new market as a function of market size. This leads to several new predictions compared to the standard model: The productivity of non exporters and exporters depends...

This Paper develops a model in which the interaction between product market imperfections, transportation costs, unions and workers immobility across regions creates a tendency for agglomeration of firms when transportation costs are low. The model fits quite well the European experience. It is...