This article examines the performances of French exporting firms. Using a highly detailed database, we confirm that exporting firms are much bigger, more productive and more profitable than domestic ones. This difference is particularly strong for firms exporting to non-eu markets, and for small...

Most of the theoretical and empirical studies on the Home Market Effect (HME) assume the existence of an \outside good" that absorbs all trade imbalances and equalizes wages. We study the consequences on the HME of removing this assumption. The HME is attenuated and, more interestingly, it...

New Economic Geography models describe a cumulative process of spatial agglomeration: Firms tend to cluster in locations with good access to demand, and similarly, workers are drawn to regions where market potential is high because the price index is lower there. This paper provides an empirical...

We study the impact of changing relative market access in an enlarged EU on the economies of incumbent Objective 1 regions. First, we track the impact of external opening on internal spatial configurations in a three-region economic geography model. External opening gives rise to potentially...

Traditional trade models ignoring the dimension of product quality generally lead to excessively low trade price elasticities. In this paper, we show that higher estimated trade price elasticities, more in conformity with theory, can be obtained by controlling product quality in trade equations....

This paper focuses on the relation between trade openness and the location of economicactivity in a country. The problematic lies in the context of the EU enlargement process and ofits impact on the location of economic activity inside each of the accessing countries. We develop a new economic...

In order to promote international trade in services, the WTO-GATS aims at progressively eliminating discriminatory regulations, which apply to foreign suppliers, byguaranteeing equal national treatment. This paper looks instead at the trade effect of domestic regulations, which apply to all...

This paper provides an empirical investigation of the cohesion versus growth tradeoff on European regions at a fine geographical disaggregation level. We use data on gdp per capita at the nuts3 level for 1980-2000 to estimate the influence of income dispersion within nuts1 on their economic...