We set up a two-country general equilibrium model, in which heterogeneous firms from one country (the source country) can offshore routine tasks to a low-wage host country. The most productive firms self-select into offshoring, and the impact on welfare in the source country can be positive or...

Quantifying the welfare effects of trade liberalization is a core issue in international trade. Existing frameworks assume perfect labor markets and therefore ignore the effects of aggregate employment changes for welfare. We develop a quantitative trade framework which explicitly models labor...

We use Spanish firm-level data to test the hold-up model of global sourcing proposed by Antr s & Helpman (2004). We propose a novel representation of the model which guides us in bringing the theory to the data. We estimate a discrete choice model of firms' sourcing behavior, separately for the...

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...

In this paper we take a detailed look at the sectoral anatomy of regional growth in German regions over the period 1978-2008. In the aggregate, the German economy is characterized by a secular decline of the manufacturing sector and a rise of the modern service economy. This trend of structural...

What are the welfare and employment consequences of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for developing and emerging countries? Standard quantitative models of international trade which are generally used to assess the impact of PTAs assume full employment and hence abstract from (net)...

Trade liberalization is no Pareto-improvement - there are winners (high-skilled) and losers (low-skilled). To compensate the losers the government is assumed to introduce unemployment benefits (UB). These benefits are financed by either a wage tax, a payroll tax, or a profit tax. Using a...

This paper looks inside the firm and investigates how trade alters the matching of worker-specific abilities and task-specific requirements. The outcome of this matching depends on how firms organize their recruitment process and how much they invest into the screening of applicants. In the open...

This paper is a dynamic extension of the well-known theory of trade in tasks. In my model, a firm's offshoring decision is governed by production cost savings, but also considers potential imitation risk. I show that such a consideration reduces the level of offshoring compared to a static...

This paper proposes a simple multi-industry trade model with search frictions in the labor market. It will be shown that the reallocation of capital across countries in formof FDI leads to changes in unemployment at the extensive and intensive industry margins. Whether a country benefits from...