This paper studies imports of quality products. The issue is more and more relevant because of the strong evidence of such differentiation in international trade. We first derive individual demand, then we aggregate without using the representative consumer hypothesis. We find that quality...

Intra-Industry Trade implies similar trade specialisation and is often associated with product differentiation. Differentiation depends on either quality or characteristics and two-way flows can be divided accordingly. If quality matters, we can measure relative quality of exports and imports....

The increasing outward orientation of the Chinese economy — specialized in the same sectors included in the "Made in Italy" — has raised worries on the future of Italy's international specialization. This paper analyses OECD imports from Italy, France, Spain and China and shows that the...

World trade has increased in the recent years and international trade flows are often intra-industrial, thus competition is based on quality and characteristics other than on cost. Italy is exceptional respect to developed economies: it did not leave mature industries to specialise in advanced...

Home country effects of domestic firms investing abroad have been a highly debated issue. Overall, the results of a number of empirical studies seem not to support the fear that MNEs are exporting domestic production and/or jobs; however the issue should be examined more deeply. In particular,...

This paper estimates the diffusion and obsolescence of technological knowledge by technological field, country and type of institutions that generates it. We use two comparable samples of patents and patent citations from the NBER U.S. Patent Citations Dataset (based on patents from the US...