Investments in R&D in Monopolistic Competitive Trade Model

Abstract

We study a monopolistic competition model in the open economy case. The utility of consumers are additive separable. The producers can choose technology (R&D) endogenously. We examine the local comparative statics of market equilibrium with respect to trade costs (of iceberg type). Our main finding is the following: increasing trade costs has opposite impacts on mass of firms and productivity. Moreover, we study the cases of small trade costs and symmetric (on numbers of consumers) countries.