This paper analyses the importance of German wage moderation in the context of European imbalances. Using information from a New Keynesian small open economy model with labor market frictions, we derive sign restrictions for a wage markup shock. This information enables us to identify a German...

Regional differences in banking integration determined how Japan s Great Recession after 1990 spread across the country. We explain these differences with the emergence of silk reeling as the main export industry after Japan s opening to trade in the 19th century. The silk-exporting prefectures...

We apply an in nite horizon intertemporal optimization model to a simple speculative attack framework. Thereby, the central bank faces a one control two-state variables optimization problem with endogenuous exit. By setting the interest rate the central bank can stimulate the economy or fend o...

Since the onset of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, credit risk spreads in Europe have diverged. Despite this divergence, credit risk comoves strongly within certain country groups such as the eurozone periphery. We seek to answer what the determinants of the observed pattern of credit risk...

We provide empirical evidence that US financial stress shocks (US-FSSs) are an important driver for economic dynamics and fluctuations in emerging market economies (EMEs). Applying a structural vector autoregression, we analyze the international transmission of US-FSSs to eight EMEs using...

This paper sets up a heterogeneous firms model, where production consists of a continuum of tasks that differ in complexity. Firms hire low-skilled and high-skilled workers to perform these tasks. How firms assign workers to tasks depends on factor prices for the two skill types and the...

How shifts in the economic leadership between countries can occur has been widely debated not only since the recent catch up of China in several sectors. However, there is no adequate theoretical model analyzing this question in the light of trade liberalization. This paper is the first one to...

The last century has witnessed dramatic changes in the world economy. The service (tertiary) sector, which at the beginning of the 20th century was of little importance relative to agriculture and manufacturing, has become the dominant sector today, accounting for 80% and more of value added in...

This paper studies the effect of trade facilitation on vertical firm structure using plant-level data from Switzerland. Based on the Business Census and the Input-Output table, we first calculate a binary measure of vertical integration for all plants registered in Switzerland. We then estimate...

Krugman's (1979, 1980) monoplistic competition model of trade showed that countries with more similar per-capita GDP trade more with each other. Does this mean that developing countries shift trade towards developed countries as a result of high economic growth? The results reported in this...