演講者簡介 : Wen-Tai Hsu got his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Minnesota in 2008. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Economics at Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interest is in applied micro theory, urban and regional economics, industrial organization, and international trade.
演講摘要 : This paper presents a model of agglomeration and selection by extending the Eaton-Kortum model of trade, BEJK (Bernard, Eaton, Jensen, and Kortum 2003) in particular, to incorporate entry of entrepreneurs and labor mobility. The selection mechanism can be decomposed into two stages: (i) Entrepreneurs engages in head-to-head Bertrand competition for the same variety, and the limiting distribution of productivity of those who survive the local competition is Frechet; (ii) trade opens up competition across regions. In a special case, this model is equivalent to Dixit-Stiglitz models in their aggregate variables, but it has richer micro-level implications under the hood of BEJK. In a larger market, the mill prices are lower, the average plant size is larger, the selection rate is smaller, but the ex post average productivity is larger. We make several points different from the literature: Selection and agglomeration are intertwined, the variance of ex post productivity distribution can be larger in the larger market, and the selection pressure across firms with different productivity differs in a continuous way and hence does not imply a minimum cutoff for survival.
