We develop a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with a traded and a non-traded sector. Using a broad class of homothetic preferences - that generate variable markups, display a simple behavior of their elasticity of substitution, and nest the ces as a limiting case - we show...

There is strong evidence that different income groups consume different bundles of goods. This evidence suggests that trade liberalization can affect welfare inequality within a country via changes in the relative prices of goods consumed by different income groups (the price effect). In this...

Increasing-returns-to-scale imperfect competition trade models predict a more than proportionate relationship between the larger country's share in world endowments and its share in producing firms: the so called home market effect (HME). While this result plays a key role in empirical testing,...

Increasing-returns-to-scale imperfect competition trade models predict a more than proportionate relationship between the larger country's share in world endowments and its share in producing firms: the so called home market effect (HME). While this result plays a key role in empirical testing,...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model of international trade that features selection across firms, products and countries. Firms' export decisions depend on a combination of firm “productivity” and firm-product-country “consumer tastes,' both of which are stochastic and unknown...

We compare trade liberalization under Cournot and Bertrand competition in reciprocal markets. In both cases, the critical level of trade costs below which the possibility of trade affects the domestic firm’s behavior is the same; trade liberalization increases trade volume monotonically; and...

The European Union and Japan have recently launched negotiations about a bilateral free trade agreement as means of economic stimulation, with trade as a driving force to create growth and wealth. Since customs duties are already low, the success of the liberalization process hinges on the...

We consider an international cartel whose members interact repeatedly in their own as well as in third-country segmented markets. Cartel discipline-an inverse measure of the degree of competition between firms-is endogenously determined by the cartel’s incentive compatibility constraint (ICC),...

We derive a simple equation for the welfare gains from trade when tariffs are liberalized or iceberg trade costs fall. Covering various one-sector trade models that may or may not feature extensive margins and imperfect competition, we generalize the analysis of Arkolakis, Costinot and...

Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...