Transportation costs are of central importance in the New Economic Geography literature, though assumptions about transportation costs continue to be simplistic. This paper begins to address these simplifications by assuming that transportation costs for manufactured goods are heterogeneous. Basic results are consistent with standard models showing dispersion of economic activity for high trans...

This paper sets up a two country monopolistic competition model with intra-industry trade to study the effects of an exogenous differential in wage and social policies on the location of industry. Two model scenarios are considered. In the traditional one with physical capital, such a differential induces a relocation effect which increases with the level of trade integration. The ‘new economic...

Communication is a real barrier to organizing international production as it hinders knowledge transmission. This paper provides evidence to suggest that a way in which multinational firms economize on costly information transfers is by using skilled foreign workers, since local talent can substitute for knowledge inputs from the headquarters. Combining U.S. data on headquarter service exports ...

This paper studies the role of land as a factor of production in a simple monopolistic competition model of trade and geography. Overall we find that land for production is a powerful dispersion force. More specifically, we show that, in contrast to the new trade literature, a larger country will have lower wages, in general. Moreover, allowing for labor mobility, we show that agglomeration is ...

Family Location and Caregiving Patterns from an International Perspective This paper conducts a cross-national econometric analysis of intra-family location and caregiving patterns. First, we assess, from an international perspective, the relationship between family structure and the geographic proximity between adult children and their parents. We then examine whether differences in family str...

‘‘New Tigers” (including city commercial banks) outperform state-owned commercial banks burdened with non-performing loans from unprofitable state-owned enterprises. We study whether this is solely due to superior corporate governance (multiple shareholders versus total government ownership) or also to the favorable environment (the New Tigers target affluent China, while state-owned commercial...

The advent of Web 2.0 has encouraged restaurant customers to post online reviews, and oftentimes, not in favor the company. When a service failure occurs, customer may voice their complaints publicly online. company, on other hand, opportunity respond these use it as part recovery strategy. While some companies are responding negative only few have knowledge how do effectively. Built perceived ...

The present paper thoroughly explores second-best efficient allocations in an adverse selection insurance economy. We start from a natural extension of the classical model, assuming less than perfect risk perceptions. We propose first and second welfare theorems, by means of which we describe efficiencyenhancing policies. Notions of weak and strong adverse selection are promising for interpreti...