Reza Oladi

Foreign Direct Investment, Non‐Traded Goods and Real Wages

Using a three-sector general equilibrium model with non-traded goods, we investigate the impact of foreign direct investment on the real wages of skilled and unskilled workers. We show that foreign direct investment increases the real wages of skilled and unskilled workers, but widens the gap between the two under plausible conditions.

Is Regionalism Viable? A Case for Global Free Trade

We assume an imperfectly competitive world with n commodities and address the question of whether or not (regional) trade blocs are viable. To answer this fundamental question, we use a notion of stability, offered by Greenberg (1990), and show that regional trade blocs are not viable as they are not stable. On the other hand, we demonstrate that a global trade bloc is viable. Therefore, our results provide theoretical support for advocates of global free trade.

Sophisticated) Stable Sets in Exchange Economies

Within the framework of (pure) exchange economies, we demonstrate that the von Neumann and Morgenstern stable set in the allocation space may differ from that in the corresponding utility space. Following Harsanyi (1974, Management Sci. 20, 1472-1495), we then define the notion of the sophisticated stable set and establish an equivalent theorem: like the core, the sophisticated stable set in the allocation space coincides with that in the utility space. We also show that the sophisticated stable set has the desirable property of individual rationality.

Monopolistic Competition and North-South Trade

We examine the consequences of opening to international trade for a developing economy with open urban unemployment and rural-urban migration, where the urban sector is monopolistically competitive. We show that there exists a threshold level of urbanization prior to which increases in product variety will be reflected in increased urban unemployment, that opening to intra-industry trade with a high-wage economy (i.e., North-South trade) will reduce the rate of urban unemployment by a greater amount than intra-industry trade with a similar economy, and that trade intervention in the South may lower welfare by reducing varieties produced in the North.

Buyer and Seller Concentration in Global Commodity Markets

Commodity markets may be characterized by concentration on the buyer side, with a small number of transnational intermediary firms purchasing from supplying countries and distributing to the market. In many cases, developing economies may have little choice but to sell through these intermediaries, and recent work has suggested the export taxes may be an optimal policy to recapture some of the monopsony rent. However, in many commodity markets there are a limited number of large supplying countries. Even if the markets are competitive, this supply-side concentration suggests that economies have market power themselves, and that the governments of the countries may be engaged in a strategic game when selecting trade policies. We consider a situation where an oligopsonistic intermediary industry purchases from a small number of supplying countries, the governments of which act strategically in their policy choices both with respect to the intermediaries and any competing suppliers. In the resulting two-stage game, we show that an export subsidy may arise as the optimal intervention.

Technical Progress, Urban Unemployment and Heterogeneous Firms

We construct a general equilibrium model of urban unemployment with a continuum of heterogeneous urban firms producing differentiated products in a monopolistic competitive market. We introduce a notion of pattern of technical progress among the heterogeneous urban firms and show that this pattern plays a crucial role in determining the effects of urban technical progress in a developing economy. In particular, we show that the possibility of immiserizing technical progress depends on the pattern of progress among the heterogeneous urban firms.

Excel Models for International Trade Theory and Policy: An Online Resource

URL: http://sites.google.com/site/jgilberteconomics/Home/excel/

On technical progress and the boundary of non-traded goods

We use a Ricardian model with continuum of goods to study the effect of technical progress on the endogenously determined ranges of non-traded, exported, and imported goods. We show that if technical progress is unbiased (biased toward the goods that a country has more comparative advantage), the range of non-traded goods increases (decreases).

Uniform Technical Progress: Can It Be Harmful?

In a model incorporating trade in final goods, intermediate goods and capital, we show how uniform technical progress across sectors can lead to immiserization. The condition for immiserizing technical progress crucially depends on the pattern of specialization. Our results tend to hold in a more general specification of the basic structure.

Strategic advertising: The fat-cat effect and stability☆

In this paper we use the theory of social situations (TOSS) to examine the stability in advertising and (price) competition games. In this context, we derive the interesting result that with endogenous and exogenous advertising the incumbent need not maintain a hungry-look, i.e., under-investment in advertising expenditure, in order to deter entry.