We consider a duopoly market with heterogeneous consumers. The firms initially produce vertically differentiated standard products located at the end points of the variety interval. Customization provides ideal varieties for consumers but has no effect on quality. The firms first choose whether to customize their products, then engage in price competition. We show that the low-quality firm neve...

This paper presents a long run analysis of industry behavior allowing for entry and exit, and cost heterogeneity among firms. Treating the number of firms as endogenous provides linkages between firms’ conduct (reflecting the exercise of market power) and market structure. In steady state equilibrium, the implications of cost structure for market equilibrium price, firms’ conduct and industry c...

When firms are heterogeneous, there may not exist a common collusive price that raises all firms’profits. However it is shown that there always exists a common minimum price that raises all firms’profits.

As developing economies have increasingly implemented investment liberalization to attract foreign investment, its impact on multinational firms is a crucial policy question. This paper seeks to quantify the response of individual multinational firms to a reduction in investment costs in developing countries. Calibrating the firm-heterogeneity model of Eaton, Kortum, and Kramarz (2011) to match...

This paper examines the response of industries and firms to changes in trade costs. Several new firm-level models of international trade with heterogeneous firms predict that industry productivity will rise as trade costs fall due to the reallocation of activity across plants within an industry. Using disaggregated U.S. import data, we create a new measure of trade costs over time and industrie...

A key emerging insight in international economics is that the scope for quality differentiation can help to explain patterns in export prices at the level of products or firms. In this paper, a unified theoretical framework of firm heterogeneity in cost and quality is brought to bear on an expansive data set of U.S. import transaction prices collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Th...

We evaluate the impact of firm-specific export subsidies on exports in Colombia. Using a twostage selection correction procedure, we obtain firm-specific predicted subsidy amounts that can be explained by the characteristics that determine the firms’ eligibility for government support and its amount. Drawing on the accounts of the discretionary allocation of subsidies in developing countries, w...

This paper investigates whether the principle of minimum differentiation extends to the location choices of multi-product firms of different sizes supplying differentiated goods to consumers with heterogeneous tastes. Our analysis explicitly allows for the possibility that the resulting location equilibria will be asymmetric, and we compare the multiproduct equilibria with the location configur...

We incorporate managerial e¤orts inside …rms in a standard monopolistic competition model a la Krugman(1980) with heterogenous …rms. The manager works to increase probability of productivity improvement for the …rm. Due to unobservable managerial e¤ort and limited liability, the optimal managerial compensation scheme links the market performance of the …rm to managerial incentives. Managers in ...

Theoretical analyses of the effects of works councils show ambiguous results. Therefore an empirical investigation of the issue is inevitable. The results so far are mixed, frequently a positive effect on productivity, but a negative one on profits is found. The problem of both theoretical and empirical studies is the assumption of firm homogeneity. To close this gap, we take into account firm ...