Government policies in a granular global economy

Using a granular model of international trade, we study the rationale and implications of various government interventions targeted at large individual firms. In antitrust regulation, governments face an incentive to be overly lenient towards domestic mergers in comparative advantage sectors. In trade policy, targeting individual foreign exporters rather than entire sectors minimizes the pass-through of import tariffs into domestic consumer prices, shifting the burden towards foreign producers. In industrial policy, subsidizing ‘national champions’ is generally suboptimal in closed economies as it leads to an excessive build-up of market power, yet it may become unilaterally welfare improving in open economies at the cost of the foreign consumers.