Footloose Capital, Market Access, and the Geography of Regional State Aid

The global welfare implications of home market effects in trade models with imperfect competition are little understood. This paper proposes a simple model in which such implications can be easily analyzed. It shows an overall tendency of imperfectly competitive sectors to inefficiently cluster in locations that offer market access advantages. The more so the stronger the market power of firms as well as the intensity of increasing returns to scale and the lower the trade costs. As such features are likely to differ widely across sectors, those results provide theoretical ground to the promotion of regional policies that are also sectorspecific and not only region-specific as currently in the EU.economic integration, specialization, home market effect, regional disparities, regional policy, International Relations/Trade, Political Economy, F12, L13, R13,

Footloose Capital, Market Access, and the Geography of Regional State Aid

The global welfare implications of home market effects in trade models with imperfect competition are little understood. This paper proposes a simple model in which such implications can be easily analyzed. It shows an overall tendency of imperfectly competitive sectors to inefficiently cluster in locations that offer market access advantages. The more so the stronger the market power of firms as well as the intensity of increasing returns to scale and the lower the trade costs. As such features are likely to di¤er widely across sectors, those results provide theoretical ground to the promotion of regional policies that are also sector-specific and not only region-specific as currently in the EU.economic integration, specialization, home market effect, regional disparities, regional policy

The happy few: the internationalisation of European firms

The 2007 report from the research network European Firms and International Markets (EFIM) is the first systematic, cross-country, firm-level research of the features of European firms that compete in international markets.

happy few: the internationalisation of European firms New facts based on firm-level evidence.

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Agglomeration, Trade and Selection

This paper studies how firm heterogeneity in terms of productivity affects the balance between agglomeration and dispersion forces in the presence of pecuniary externalities through a selection model of monopolistic competition with variable mark-ups. It shows that firm heterogeneity matters. However, whether it shifts the balance from agglomeration to dispersion or the other way round depends on its specific features along the two defining dimensions of diversity: 'richness' and 'evenness'. Accordingly, the role of firm heterogeneity in selection models of agglomeration cannot be fully understood without paying due attention to various moments of the underlying firm productivity distribution.agglomeration, trade, heterogeneity, selection, economic geography

The Economic Value of Cultural Diversity: Evidence from US cities

We use data on wages and rents in different U.S. cities to assess the amenity effects on production and consumption of cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of city residents. We show that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born increased between 1970 and 1990 have experienced a significant average increase in their wage and in the rental price of their housing. Such finding is economically significant and robust to omitted variable bias and endogeneity bias. We then present a model in which cultural diversity may have both production and consumption amenity or disamenity effects. As people and firms are mobile across cities in the long run, the model implies that the joint results from the wage and rent regressions are consistent with a dominant production amenity effect of cultural diversityCultural Diveristy, Productivity, Local Amenities, Urban Economics

The Economic Value of Cultural Diversity: Evidence from US Cities

What are the economic consequences to U.S. natives of the growing diversity of American cities? Is their productivity or utility affected by cultural diversity as measured by diversity of countries of birth of U.S. residents? We document in this paper a very robust correlation: US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas where the share of foreign-born increased between 1970 and 1990, experienced a significant increase in their wage and in the rental price of their housing. Such finding is economically significant and survives omitted variable bias and endogeneity bias. As people and firms are mobile across cities in the long run we argue that, in equilibrium, these correlations are consistent only with a net positive effect of cultural diversity on productivity of natives.

Special Interests and Technological Change

We study an OLG economy where productivity growth comes from two alternative sources: process innovation and learning-by-doing. There is a trade-off between the two in so far as frequent technological updates reduce the scope for learning on existing technologies. A conflict is shown to arise between the young and the old, because the former favor innovation while the latter prefer learning. We model the interaction between overlapping generations and policy makers as a dynamic common agency problem, where competing generations invest a certain amount of resources to lobby either for the maintenance of the current technology or the adoption of a new one. By focusing on truthful Markov perfect equilibria, we characterize the political equilibrium and show its dependence on the underlying demographic, technological and preference parameters.Technological change, Technology option, Pressure goups, Dynamic common agency