Monopolistic Competition Model Research Articles

Estimating Disparity in Welfare Gains from Trade between Firm Owners and Workers

This study quantifies the uneven welfare gains from trade between firm owners and workers in a multi-country model of monopolistic competition under a demand system of constant elasticity of substitution (CES). An agent decides to start up her own firm or to be employed as a worker according to her level of innate capability, which determines the productivity of her potential launched firm. Although keeping this model isomorphic to Melitz's (2003) heterogeneous firm model in terms of the aggregate welfare gains from trade, we are able to examine the welfare gains for firm owners and workers, respectively. Theoretically, we find that countries with lower domestic expenditure shares display higher disparities in welfare gains from trade between firm owners and workers. Taking the model to data, we illustrate the application of the methodology by calculating the respective average welfare gains (compared to autarky) of firm owners and of workers for 14 countries, including G7, BRIC, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Among them, Singapore has relatively lower domestic expenditure shares and shows dramatically large disparity in welfare gains between these two occupations. Taking the year of 2006 as an example, the gap in welfare gains in Singapore reaches to 445.03% while the same measure in the United States is only 9.95%.

Do Rising Labour Costs Drive Innovation in Enterprises? Propensity Score Matching Evidence from Chinese Firms

AbstractThis paper uses a monopolistic competition model and propensity score matching (PSM) with Chinese firm‐level data to determine whether rising labour costs drive innovation within enterprises. The results indicate that rising wages do drive firms to invest more in R&D and use more capital to substitute for labour to minimize costs, which improves total factor productivity. The results are verified by several robustness tests.

Capital taxation and imperfect competition: ACE vs. CBIT

This paper compares the Comprehensive Business Income Tax (CBIT) and the Allowance for Corporate Equity tax (ACE) under imperfect competition using an oligopoly Salop model and a monopolistic competition model. A key insight is that the effect of a switch to either tax system depends on technology and the intensity of competition. Both tax systems are distortionary when entry is endogenous. Using the Salop model, we show that ACE (CBIT) tends to improve welfare in decreasing returns (increasing returns) to scale industries, whereas the two regimes are welfare neutral in constant returns to scale industries.

Model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous labor

The paper presents a tool for modelling monopolistic competition markets, based on Dixit-Stiglitz ideology but taking into account heterogeneity at labor market. We analyse several modifications of a two-sector general equilibrium model. In the basic one with two levels of workers qualification their shares are determined endogenously on the base of comparison between the higher wage of the skilled worker and heterogeneous education costs, also taking into account the labor mobility between the manufacture and agriculture sector. The model is generalized for the case of continuous distribution of labor qualification. The impact of the model parameters (ratio of fixed and variable costs, market size, heterogeneity in productivity, elasticity of substitution, etc.) on the obtained equilibrium prices, quantities, wages, number and size of firms, social welfare is investigated.

Changing Market Conversion and Evolving Ways to Compete: Evidence from Retail Gasoline

This paper examines the pricing behavior of sellers in a market undergoing a significant restructuring using data from the ongoing introduction of self-service technology in the Korean gasoline market in the 2000s. I provide evidence that the full-service premium (or equivalently, self-service discount) increased during the market transition. I show that a simple model of monopolistic competition is not enough to explain the increasing premium. I find that the pricing behavior of sellers differ by product position: self-service sellers compete for price-sensitive consumers, whereas full-service sellers differentiate their product by offering a variety of bundled products and services, such as coffee, carwash or even a nail salon, to compete for less-price-sensitive consumers. Taken together, the strategic choices of sellers evolve in different ways when market structure changes, each type of seller using its unique position, resulting in an increase in the full-service premium in this market.

A theory of price adjustment under loss aversion

We present a new partial equilibrium theory of price adjustment, based on consumer loss aversion. In line with prospect theory, the consumers’ perceived utility losses from price increases are weighted more heavily than the perceived utility gains from price decreases of equal magnitude. Price changes are evaluated relative to an endogenous reference price, which depends on the consumers’ rational price expectations from the recent past. By implication, demand responses are more elastic for price increases than for price decreases and thus firms face a downward-sloping demand curve that is kinked at the consumers’ reference price. Firms adjust their prices flexibly in response to variations in this demand curve, in the context of an otherwise standard dynamic neoclassical model of monopolistic competition. The resulting theory of price adjustment is starkly at variance with past theories. We find that – in line with the empirical evidence – prices are more sluggish upwards than downwards in response to temporary demand shocks, while they are more sluggish downwards than upwards in response to permanent demand shocks. The degree of these asymmetries, in turn, depends on the size of the shock.

Toward a theory of monopolistic competition

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition, which encompasses existing models while being flexible enough to take into account new demand and competition features. Even though preferences need not be additive and/or homothetic, the market outcome is still driven by the sole variable elasticity of substitution. We impose elementary conditions on this function to guarantee empirically relevant properties of a free-entry equilibrium. Comparative statics with respect to market size and productivity shocks are characterized through necessary and sufficient conditions. Furthermore, we show that the attention to the CES based on its normative implications was misguided: we propose a new class of preferences, which express consumers' uncertainty about their love for variety, that yield variable markups and may sustain the optimum. Last, we show how our approach can cope with heterogeneous firms once it is recognized that the elasticity of substitution is firm-specific.

Welfare Analysis and Policy Implications in Melitz-Type Model Where Markup Differs Across Industries

We construct a monopolistic competition model considering different markups across industries and firm-level heterogeneity of productivity. An excess entry occurs in low-markup (competitive) industry, and vice versa in high-markup (non-competitive) industry. To achieve the optimum allocation, a social planner should implement an appropriate mix of policies, whose requirement is tighter than the homogeneous-firm model under some situations. The total amount of optimum subsidy (tax) is dependent on the property of distribution when the elasticity of substitution between industries is above unity.

Optimal Taxation of Internalities: The Role of Market Incentives

An internality arises whenever a decision maker fails to maximize his own expected utility. This can happen due to imperfect information, cognitive bias, or lack of willpower, among other causes. This paper considers what the implications are for the optimal taxation of goods when consumers suffer from internalities. Prior research on this topic is limited to markets with perfect competition and ignores the incentive that firms have to de-bias consumers. I show that relaxing these assumptions changes the resulting conclusions. First, I analyze a market with imperfect competition, specifically Hotelling's model of monopolistic competition. I find that internality correction, even if costless, is not always desirable in such markets because firms change prices when the demand for their product changes, and these price changes can cause an inefficient reallocation of goods. Second, I analyze optimal taxation of internalities when firms have the ability to de-bias consumers. In such cases, the standard logic, which prescribes taxes equal to marginal internalities, does not apply. I find that, in general, market incentives attenuate the optimal internality tax (or subsidy) relative to a model with no firm de-biasing technology.

General Equilibrium Models of Monopolistic Competition: Quantity, Diversity, and Welfare

Roughly speaking, there are two Dixit-Stiglitz monopolistic competition models. One assumes that all consumers are captured by a common utility function and the other assumes that each consumer is represented by an identical utility function. This paper studies if these two models have similar implications on welfare. Based on a broad definition on homothetic preferences, we show that homothetic preferences are not enough for them to generate identical welfare; in fact, the associated utility function needs to be homogeneous of degree one.

Trade costs, quality and the skill premium

AbstractWe develop a monopolistic competition model with non‐homothetic factor input bundles where increasing quality requires increasing use of skilled workers. As a result more skill abundant countries export higher quality, higher priced goods. Using a multi‐country dataset, we test and confirm the findings in Schott of a positive effect of skill abundance on unit values identified with US data. We extend the core model with per unit trade costs leading to the Washington apples effect that goods shipped over larger distance are of higher quality. The combination of high‐quality goods being relatively skill intensive with the Washington apples effect implies that countries at a larger distance from their trading partners display a higher skill premium. Simulating our model, we find that a doubling of distance of a country relative to all its trading partners raises the skill premium in a country by about 1.6%.

Macroeconomic (in)stability and endogenous market structure with productive government expenditure

AbstractWe consider the congestion effect of productive government spending in a monopolistic competition model with endogenous entry, and analyze the possibility of local indeterminacy. Some main findings emerge from the analysis. First, the indeterminacy condition is independent of the monopoly power. Second, productive government expenditure can be a source of local indeterminacy, while a higher degree of public goods congestion lessens the beneficial effect of productive government expenditure, and therefore reduces the possibility of indeterminacy. Third, a higher degree of internal returns to scale is associated with a lower possibility for the emergence of indeterminacy when production externalities are present.

Gains from variety? Product differentiation and the possibility of losses from trade under Cournot oligopoly with free entry

In a free-entry Cournot oligopoly model with a quadratic utility function that yields differentiated products, it is shown that there are losses from trade when the trade cost is close to the prohibitive level. Although the total number of varieties increases, there is a reduction in consumer surplus. This occurs because trade leads to an increase in imported varieties where consumer surplus is low due to the high trade cost and a decrease in domestically-produced varieties where consumer surplus is high. This result is in contrast with results from the free-entry Cournot oligopoly models with homogeneous products of Brander and Krugman (1983) and Venables (1985); the monopolistic competition models such as Krugman (1980) and Venables (1987), and heterogeneous firm models such as Melitz (2003) and Melitz and Ottaviano (2008).

Heterogeneous Consumers and Trade Patterns in a Monopolistically Competitive Setting

The paper considers a two-country trade model of monopolistic competition featuring the heterogeneity of consumer preferences both within and across countries. The incorporation of heterogeneity into a traditional monopolistic competition setting is achieved by assuming different elasticities of substitution in the CES utility function for different consumers. The proposed setup expands on the traditional model of trade by demonstrating a richer set of country specific effects. The key question analysed in the paper is how consumer heterogeneity and trade liberalization affect markups and wages in different countries. Unlike the canonical CES-model of trade, where markups in different countries are constant and identical to each other, our model, by taking consumer heterogeneity into account, provides different markups across countries, incorporating both heterogeneity and trade specifics. The model also predicts that the larger of two countries engaged in costly trade may have a wage rate higher than, lower than or equal to that of the smaller one, depending on the general equilibrium conditions. This finding is in contrast to that of the canonical setting, where the larger country under costly trade always has a higher wage rate.

Export vs. FDI: Sandwich Sorting with Quadratic Preferences

By applying quadratic instead of CES consumer preferences in a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms, this paper investigates the robustness of the conventional sorting of cross-border active firms, first described by Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple (2004), and finds thereby an alternative type of sorting: While (sufficiently) productive firms export and more productive ones engage in foreign direct investment (FDI), the most productive firms do not undertake FDI, but export again, establishing the so-called sandwich sorting. Evidence for this type can be observed for investment and services trade patterns.

Gains from Trade Under Monopolistic Competition

The monopolistic competition model in international trade predicts three sources of gains from trade that are not present in traditional models: consumer gains from having access to new import varieties of differentiated products; gains from a reduction in firm markups due to import competition; and gains from the self‐selection of more efficient firms into export markets, provided that firms are heterogeneous in their productivities. With the added assumption that the distribution of firms’ productivity is Pareto, and with a support that is unbounded above, we argue that only the third source of gains from trade, due to the self‐selection of firms, operates. This result helps to explain the simple formula for the gains from trade found by Arkolakis et al. (2012). If the Pareto distribution is bounded above, however, then all three sources of gains from trade operate once again.

The Effects of Fiscal Policy in a Monopolistic Competition Model with Keynesian features

The Effects of Fiscal Policy in a Monopolistic Competition Model with Keynesian features

Toward a Theory of Monopolistic Competition

We propose a general model of monopolistic competition which encompasses existing models while being flexible enough to take into account new demand and competition features. Even though preferences need not be additive and/or homothetic, the market outcome is still driven by the sole variable elasticity of substitution. We impose elementary conditions on this function to guarantee empirically relevant properties of a free-entry equilibrium. Comparative statics with respect to market size and productivity shock are characterized through necessary and sufficient conditions. Furthermore, we show that the attention to the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) based on its normative implications was misguided: constant mark-ups, additivity and homotheticity are neither necessary nor sufficient for the market to deliver the optimum outcome. Our approach can cope with heterogeneous firms once it is recognized that the elasticity of substitution is firm-specific. Finally, we show how our set-up can be extended to cope with multiple sectors.

Specialization vs. Competition: An Anatomy of Increasing Returns to Scale

We develop a two-sector model of monopolistic competition with a differentiated intermediate good and variable elasticity of technological substitution. This setting proves to be well-suited to studying the nature and origins of external increasing returns. We disentangle two sources of scale economies: specialization and competition. The former depends only on how TFP varies with input diversity, while the latter is fully captured by the behavior of the elasticity of substitution across inputs. This distinction gives rise to a full characterization of the rich array of competition regimes in our model. The necessary and sufficient conditions for each regime to occur are expressed in terms of the relationships between TFP and the elasticity of substitution as functions of the input diversity. Moreover, we demonstrate that, despite the folk wisdom resting on CES models, specialization economies are in general neither necessary nor sufficient for external increasing returns to emerge. This highlights the profound and non-trivial role of market competition in generating agglomeration economies, endogenous growth, and other phenomena driven by scale economies.

When Ricardo Meets Chamberlin: A Simple Dynamic Model of Monopolistic Competition

We develop a dynamic model of monopolistic competition which sheds light on how the interplay between the degree of product differentiation and intertemporal elasticity of substitution affects the steady-state equilibrium. Consumers love variety and split their labor endowment between wage labor, which brings immediate income, and producing capital, which yields a rent in the future. The impact of the elasticity of substitution across varieties on the market outcome depends crucially on whether consumption today and consumption tomorrow are gross substitutes or gross complements. The case of Cobb-Douglas intertemporal utility is a borderline situation, when the market outcome is invariant to the degree of product differentiation. We also fully characterize the unique steady-state equilibrium path and show that the key dynamic properties of the model, such as local stability and determinacy of equilibrium, also hinge mainly on the interplay between the intra- and intertemporal elasticities of substitution.