The division of labor and the extent of the market

Summary. A firms degree of specialization is modeled as the number of different goods it produces. When a firm chooses its degree of specialization, it faces a tradeoff between the fixed cost and the marginal cost of production. A firms degree of specialization is shown to increase with the extent of the market. Meanwhile, the real wage rate, as a measure of the extent of the market, is endogenously determined in the model and is shown to increase with the division of labor.Received: 29 April 2002, Revised: 18 June 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: A10.The author thanks an anonymous referee and Antonio Ciccone for their very valuable and constructive suggestions. I thank Deborah Minehart, Robert Schwab, and Daniel Vincent for their valuable guidance and advice. I also thank Mingchao Chen, David Selover, and Xiaokai Yang for their helpful advice.