Paolo Epifani

Journal Article Journal of International Economics · September 1, 2017 We study the welfare effects of trade imbalances in a two-sector model of monopolistic competition. As in perfect competition, a trade surplus involves an income transfer to the deficit country and possibly a terms-of-trade deterioration. Unlike the conven ... Full text Cite

Monopolistic competition: CES redux?

Journal Article Journal of International Economics · January 1, 2014 We study the competitive and reallocation effects of trade opening in monopolistic competition. To this purpose, we generalize the Melitz (2003) setup with heterogeneous firms and fixed and variable trade costs beyond the CES to the case of additively sepa ... Full text Cite

Trade imbalances, export structure and wage inequality

Journal Article Economic Journal · January 1, 2014 We study, both theoretically and empirically, how trade imbalances affect the structure of countries' exports and wage inequality. We show that, in a Heckscher-Ohlin model with a continuum of goods, a Southern (Northern) trade surplus leads to an increase ... Full text Cite

Productivity, Quality and Export Behaviour

Journal Article Economic Journal · December 1, 2012 We find a robust negative correlation between Italian firms' productivity and their export share to low-income destinations. To account for this surprising fact, we marry Verhoogen (2008) with Eaton (2011), by introducing firm heterogeneity in product qual ... Full text Cite

Trade, markup heterogeneity and misallocations

Journal Article Journal of International Economics · January 1, 2011 Markups vary widely across industries and countries, their heterogeneity has increased overtime and asymmetric exposure to international trade seems partly responsible for this phenomenon. In this paper, we study how the entire distribution of markups affe ... Full text Cite

Openness, government size and the terms of trade

Journal Article Review of Economic Studies · April 15, 2009 This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of governments, both theoretically and empirically. We argue that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms-of-trade externality, whereby tra ... Full text Cite

The skill bias of world trade

Journal Article Economic Journal · July 1, 2008 This article suggests that international trade, even between identical countries, can raise the relative demand for skilled labour. It shows that a simple generalisation of Krugman's (1979) model of trade in differentiated products has implications for the ... Full text Cite

Increasing returns, imperfect competition, and factor prices

Journal Article Review of Economics and Statistics · November 1, 2006 We show how, in general equilibrium models featuring increasing returns, imperfect competition, and endogenous markups, changes in the scale of economic activity affect the income distribution across factors. Whenever final goods are gross substitutes (gro ... Full text Cite

"GATT-think" with asymmetric countries

Journal Article Review of International Economics · August 1, 2006 We argue that a trade agreement which conforms to GATT's reciprocity rule benefits the (stronger) less trade-dependent country at the expense of the (weaker) more trade-dependent country. Reciprocity is so unfavorable to the weaker country that it may be w ... Full text Cite

Heckscher-Ohlin and agglomeration

Journal Article Regional Science and Urban Economics · November 1, 2005 We argue that embedding endowment-based comparative advantage within a standard NEG framework helps solve the indeterminacy due to multiple equilibria and the ambiguity concerning the relation between integration and specialisation (monotonicity versus non ... Full text Cite

Trade, migration and regional unemployment

Journal Article Regional Science and Urban Economics · November 1, 2005 A by now large literature in regional economics has greatly improved our understanding of the determinants of the observed spatial disparities in productivity. However, this literature neglects what seems to be a robust and persistent fact accompanying reg ... Full text Cite

On the dynamics of trade patterns

Conference Economist · January 1, 2000 In this paper we analyse the dynamics of trade patterns in the six largest industrialised countries and in eight fast growing Asian economies. For each of these countries we study the shape of the sectoral distribution of an index of trade specialisation a ... Full text Cite

Sulle determinanti del modello di specializzazione internazionale dell'Italia

Journal Article Politica Economica · August 1, 1999 Italy is a high-income industrial country. Yet, it is largely specialized in the traditional labor intensive sectors. Why? In this paper, we argue on empirical and theoretical ground that this peculiar trade structure can be explained by the joint interact ... Full text Cite