The theoretically necessary and sufficient condition for the correspondence between 'revealed'comparative advantage and pre-trade relative prices derived by Hillman (1980) is analyzed empricially for virtually all countries of the world over an extended period of time. This yields 10 stylized...

Countries are heterogeneous both internally and externally in many ways, as is widely accepted in the policy arena. The booming literature on firm heterogeneity remains under-developed regarding the degree of firm heterogeneity in developing countries and the relationship between firm...

Motivated by the work of Melitz (2003), Helpman, et al. (2004) and Yeaple (2005), micro-firm data provided by the World Bank Enterprise Survey is used to study the empirical productivity distribution across 15 Latin American countries. This paper differs from previous work in identifying four...

Changes in the distribution channels for food production in developing countries raises the demand for high quality products sold through supermarkets at higher prices. We model the willingness of farmers to invest in high quality production, taking the role of traders into consideration. We...

This paper presents a model aim to reconcile the discrepancy between the theoretical and empirical depiction of the productivity distribution. The Melitz (2003) while being able to reflect on the asymmetric selection of heterogeneous firms in trade, the model strictly truncate the least...

Using micro-data for Dutch firms, we argue that the productivity spillovers from importing technology intensive products from Taiwan differ from importing unskilled-labor intensive products from Switzerland. We show that both the geographic component (what country is the import from) and the...

We construct a unique data set in order to analyze whether or not a large temporary shock has an impact on city growth. Following recent work by Davis and Weinstein (2002) on Japan, we take the strategic bombing of German cities during WWII as an example of such a shock, and analyze its impact...

Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by Helpman (1998) and Hanson (1998, 2001a). The advantage of the Helpman-Hanson model is that it incorporates the fact that agglomeration of economic activity increases the prices of...

In the European Union, energy markets are increasingly being liberalized. A case in point is the European natural gas industry. The general expectation is that more competition will lead to lower prices and higher volumes, and hence higher welfare. This paper indicates that this might not happen...