We demonstrate that the Varian (1980) model of sales has a unique Nash equilibrium when firms incur costly advertising to compete for informed consumers. The equilibrium is symmetric. In particular, with costly advertising, the asymmetric equilibria highlighted by Baye et al. (1992) do not arise.

This paper estimates the impact of time zone differences between trading locations on trade costs and trade in general equilibrium. Using homogeneous bilateral trade data between US states and Canadian provinces, time zone differences are found to reduce bilateral trade by 11% on average, which...

This paper assesses duration-specific treatment effects of fixed currency regimes on bilateral trade along a duration path of up to 25 years. We find that country-pairs with fixed exchange rate regimes trade more, but only after about 8 years.

We investigate the causal impact of equity market liberalizations on sectoral export performance across 91 countries (1980–1997). The increased availability of external finance has boosted trade of industries that intensively use relationship-specific inputs, and lowered exports of industries...

This paper investigates the relationship between the diffusion of EU standards and product quality upgrading using highly disaggregated import data to the EU in the food industry. Results show that, on average, the diffusion of EU voluntary standards boosts the rate of quality upgrading....

We hypothesize that exports of differentiated products, which entail greater upfront costs, increase more as financial reforms take place. We find strong and robust empirical support of this hypothesis with a comprehensive set of measures of reforms encompassing the banking sector, interest...

Trade-diversion effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) have not been thoroughly examined empirically. Using a novel empirical approach, we confirm that FTAs divert trade away from non-member countries and even more so from internal trade (domestic sales) in member countries.

This paper uses plant-level data from Chile to show that an increase in sector-wide exports decreases the survival probability of exporters, but not that of non-exporters. We argue that this result can be explained by the fact that exporters and non-exporters use factors of production in...

The prevalence of Internet-based sales was highlighted by the World Bank (Ferro, 2011) associating state-of-art technology with exporters. We use propensity score kernel matching with difference-in-differences to reveal export selection and evidence of ‘technology upgrading’ through higher...

In this paper, I empirically examine the non-monotonic relationship between openness and within-group wage inequality predicted by  Helpman et al. (2010) using a panel data for the US, 1983–2005. Within-group wage inequality is measured for each industry and matched with exports. It can be...