[Current teaching] | [Exam questions] | [Replication packages]
Current teaching
Industrial economics and International trade (undergraduate)
Learning outcomes: The aim of the course is to present the main theories of international trade and investment, and the related industrial organisation concepts. First, the course analyses the interaction of firms in the market, focusing on their strategic behaviour and on how the latter is affected by the degree of competition. Second, the course introduces the main models of international trade and multinational firms to illustrate how international trade and investment affect consumers and firms, and how they impact on welfare. At the end of the course students are able to: (a) understand the causes and consequences of international trade and investment; (b) evaluate the implications of trade and investment policies in terms of welfare; (c) apply strategic interaction among firms in the context of open economies.
Topics in International trade (graduate)
Learning outcomes: The first part of the course presents in an advanced yet tractable manner theories of international trade and economic geography that describe the forces shaping the distribution of economic activity across space, and the consequences that agglomeration and dispersion forces have at the world level on economic outcomes such as prices, trade flows, wages, and welfare. Political outcomes such as voting behaviour are also analyzed. The course is centred around models of both perfect and imperfect competition, and considers more recent extensions, such as those assuming production heterogeneity and aiming at an exact quantification of the models’ properties. The second part of the course is devoted to empirical applications, where papers with a structural approach to the estimation of the models’ parameters are presented. The final empirical application is a Lab focusing on the structural estimation of gravity equations of trade, a key tool for trade policy analysis.
Exam questions
International trade and investment (undergraduate)
Topics covered in the exercises: The general traditional model; the Ricardian model; the Heckscher-Ohlin model; Models with increasing returns to scale and imperfect competition; International trade policy; Multinational enterprises and FDI (horizontal, vertical, outsourcing, licensing).
Question
Bank International Trade and Investment
Replication packages
Below are provided the replication packages for some Master’s thesis written in the framework of the programme in International Politics and Economics.
De Nicolo E. (2023) International trade of semiconductors under the WTO Information Technology Agreement: A gravity model.
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