Trade, competition, and efficiency

Even small trade costs restore efficiency in tax competition

We introduce transport cost of trade in products into the classical Zodrow andMieszkowski (1986) model of capital tax competition. It turns out that even small levels of transport cost lead to a complete breakdown of the seminal result, the underprovision of public goods. Instead, there is a symmetric equilibrium with efficient public goods provision in all jurisdictions. 2012 Elsevier Inc. All...

Strategic Trade and Delegated Competition∗

Strategic trade theory has been criticized on the grounds that its predictions are overly sensitive to modeling assumptions. Applying recent results in duopoly theory, this paper considers three-stage games in which governments choose subsidies, firms’ owners choose incentive schemes for their managers, and then the managers compete in the product market. We show that if firms’ owners have suff...

Trade Credit and Supplier Competition

This paper examines how competition among suppliers affects their willingness to provide trade credit financing. Trade credit extended by a supplier to a cash constrained retailer allows the latter to increase cash purchases from its other suppliers, leading to a free rider problem. A supplier that represents a smaller share of the retailer’s purchases internalizes a smaller part of the benefit...

Gains from trade and efficiency under monopolistic competition: a variable elasticity case

We present a general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition with variable demand elasticities and investigate the impact of free trade on welfare and efficiency. First, contrary to the constant elasticity case, in which all gains from trade are due to increasing product diversity, our model features gains from pro-competitive effects. Second, we show that the market outcome is not constr...

Expired Patients, Trade Secrets, and Stymied Competition