The Silk Road: Tax Competition among Nation States

Many commodities, before reaching their final destinations, are transshipped through several nations, each having independent authorities to tax commodities in transit. However, we show that such gmiddleh nations may be unable to exercise monopoly power over commodities in transit and all the rents are captured by the country where the commodities are produced and the country where there are markets.international tax competition, international trade, economic geography, repeated game

First-to-invent versus First-to-file: International Patent Law Harmonization and Innovation

The U.S. has been under pressure to abandon the unique first-to-invent feature of its patent law for awarding patents. The opposition to reform however argues that switch to a first-to-file rule, the international norm, will undermine innovation. We evaluate this argument in a dynamic stochastic model of a patent race. The result generally supports the opposition's argument.

Information and Disclosure in Strategic Trade Policy

We relax the standard assumption in the strategic trade policy literature that governments possess complete information about the economy. Assuming instead that governments must obtain information from firms, we examine firms' incentive to disclose information to the governments in the Brander-Spencer setting. With quantity competition, we find firms disclosing both demand and cost information, thereby justifying the literature's omniscient-government assumption. With price competition, however, firms have no incentives to disclose demand or cost information, so governments remain uninformed. Further, with quantity competition and unknown demand, governments are caught in an informational prisoner's dilemma.

Export, Foreign Direct Investment, and Joint Ventures: Learning the Rival's Costs through Propinquity

We examine the role of cost uncertainty in a firm's choice between exporting and foreign investment in oligopolistic industry. We consider both foreign direct investment and an international joint venture, and allow country-specific and firm-specific cost uncertainty. Unlike exporting, either form of foreign investment exposes home and foreign firms to common country-specific cost shocks, implying a better knowledge of each other's country-specific shocks. Further, a joint venture allows the firms to learn each other's firm-specific cost. A firm's plant location decision depends on the interaction of these two effects, which depend on the type of competition and the substitutability of the firm's products.

Multinationals, Tax Holidays, and Technology Transfer

Host country governments often grant investment incentives to foreign firms locating in their territories. We show that such preferential treatment of foreign firms can facilitate transfer of foreign technology, induce entry by the local firm, and increase host country welfare. However, this pro-competitive result occurs when preferential treatment is granted for a limited time; i.e., it takes the form of tax holidays, and is absent under permanent tax concessions.

Quotas under Dynamic Bertrand Competition

We present a new model of dynamic Bertrand competition, where a quota is treated as an intertemporal constraint rather than as a capacity constraint as is common in the literature. The firm under a quota then can still vary the rates of exports over time provided that its total sales within the period do not exceed the quota. We show that a quota results in higher prices than a tariff of equal imports. We also show that firms never play mixed strategies, which contrasts from the result from a one-shot game, in which the only equilibrium under a quota is in mixed strategies.

Endogenous Aggregate Elasticity of Substitution

In the literature studying aggregate economies the aggregate elasticity of substitution (AES) between capital and labor is often treated as a constant or “deep” parameter. This view contrasts with the conjecture put forward by Arrow et al. (1961) that AES evolves over time and changes with the process of economic development. This paper evaluates this conjecture in a simple dynamic multi-sector growth model, in which AES is endogenously determined. Our findings support the conjecture, and in particular demonstrate that AES tends to be positively related to the state of economic development, a result consistent with recent empirical findings.

Price Undertakings, VERs, and Foreign Direct Investment: The Case of Foreign Rivalry

Antidumping (AD) petitions are often withdrawn in favor of VERs and price undertakings. We compare foreign firms' incentive to engage in foreign direct investment (FDI) under a VER and a price undertaking, with special emphasis on foreign rivalry. We show that a VER is less likely to induce FDI than a price undertaking or AD. Thus, the importing country can increase the level of protection by replacing an AD duty with a VER. This may account for the GATT ban on VERs, given the proliferation of AD cases during the 1990s.

Top Dogs, Puppy Dogs, and Tax Holidays

Why do host-country governments offer tax holidays to foreign multinational firms that establish local subsidiaries? This paper shows that a tax holiday has the effect of preventing the foreign firm from monopolizing the local market. This pro-competitive effect stems paradoxically because a tax holiday makes the multinational firm temporarily a "tougher" competitor and induces local firms to delay entry into the market. Removing the threat of imminent rivalry assures the multinational firm of greater profitability and prompts it to abandon the costly entry-deterring strategy. In contrast, a permanent and uniform tax reduction tends only to strengthen the foreign firm's incentive to monopolize the host-country market.

The Profitable Suppression of Inventions: Technology Choice and Entry Deterrence

AT&T was known for both funding a world-class research lab and delaying deployment of useful innovations from the lab. To explain this behavior we consider a model with an incumbent facing a potential entrant. The incumbent can choose from two technologies for production: old and new. The entrant's choice is limited to the old. We show that, under correlated production uncertainty, use of the common technology exposes the entrant to a greater risk. Therefore, the incumbent may suppress a newer, more efficient technology in favor of the old as a means to deter entry.