Search results for "jel:F12"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Unbundling technology adoption and tfp at the firm level. Do intangibles matter?
2012
We use a panel of European firms to investigate the relationship between intangible assets and productivity. We distinguish between total factor productivity (tfp) and technology adoption, whereas standard estimations consider only a notion of productivity that conflates the two effects. Although we are unable to address simultaneity, we allow for the existence of multiple technologies within sectors through a mixture model approach. We find that intangible assets have nonnegligible effects that both push firms toward better technologies (technology adoption effects) and allow for more efficient exploitation of a given technology (tfp effects).
Quality pricing-to-market
2014
We examine firm's pricing-to-market decisions in vertically differentiated industries featuring a large number of firms that compete monopolistically in the quality space. Firms sell goods of heterogeneous quality to consumers with non-homothetic preferences that differ in their income and thus their marginal willingness to pay for quality increments. We derive closed-form solutions for the pricing game under costly international trade, thus establishing existence and uniqueness. We then examine how the interaction of good quality and market demand for quality affects firms' pricing-to-market decisions. The relative price of high quality goods compared to that of low quality goods is an inc…
Neoclassical growth, manufacturing agglomeration, and terms of trade
2007
This paper presents an integrated view of economic growth, development traps, and economic geography. We explain why there is income convergence among some countries (neoclassical regime) and income divergence among others (poverty trap regime). Income convergence (divergence) and manufacturing industry diffusion (agglomeration) are re-enforcing each other in a cumulative process. Moreover, trade openness may trigger a catch-up process of an economy that is stuck in a \"poverty trap\". This catch-up is characterized by an increase in the investment-to-GDP ratio and an improvement of the terms of trade. A new dynamic welfare gain of trade liberalization is identified, which is likely to be l…
Does complexity explain the structure of trade?
2013
This paper analyzes whether complexity, measured by the number of skilled tasks that are performed in production, explains countries commodity trade structure. We modify the Romalis ( ) model to incorporate advantage differences in complexity across commodities together with differences in the number of mistakes made by workers in the production process in developed and developing countries as a source of comparative advantage. Our model predicts that the share of developed countries in world trade increases with products complexity. Empirical tests confirm this prediction. Moreover, we find that complexity complements the explanation provided by skillintensity on countries commodity trade …
''Dual'' gravity: Using spatial econometrics to control for multilateral resistance.
2007
We propose a quantity-based `dual' version of the gravity equation that yields an estimating equation with both cross-sectional interdependence and spatially lagged error terms. Such an equation can be concisely estimated using spatial econometric techniques. We illustrate this methodology by applying it to the Canada-U.S. data set used previously, among others, by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) and Feenstra (2002, 2004). Our key result is to show that controlling directly for spatial interdependence across trade flows, as suggested by theory, significantly reduces border effects because it captures `multilateral resistance'. Using a spatial autoregressive moving average specification, we …
Testing the Home Market Effects in a Multi-country World: The Theory
2004
We extend the two-country model by Krugman (1980) to a multi-country set-up and show that the `home-market effect' highlighted with two countries does not readily extend to such a more general setting. In particular, we prove that the most important result, namely the disproportionate causation from demand to supply, generalizes only under the fairly implausible assumption of pairwise symmetric trade costs between all countries. We argue, therefore, that the implications of product differentiation for the structure of world trade are better characterized in terms of spatial (`accessibility') and non-spatial (`attraction') effects, and we provide a theory-based specification that suggests ho…