This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

We investigate the impact of incremental trade liberalization in a dynamic model of endogenous growth with heterogeneous firms and costly trade. Growth originates from horizontal specialization and the steady state productivity growth rate is positive. Innovations require costly R&D and are...

The well-known question whether regional trade agreements (RTAs) and the multilateral trading system (MTS) are "strangers, friends, or foes" (Bhagwati and Panagariya, 1996) has gained new importance with the widespread proliferation of RTAs in recent years. Based on an extensive data set which...

The risk of default that business firms face is very significant and differs widely across countries. This paper explores the links between countries' business conditions and international trade embedment and the default risk at the country level from a theoretical point of view. Our main...

World trade has grown exponentially during the last 60 years. Admittedly, it is not clear if this development can be assigned to international trade agreements like the World Trade Organization or the Generalized System of Preferences as previous empirical studies found contradicting results. In...

This study uses detailed, reliable and up-to-date linked employer-employee data that take account of both the demand and the supply side of the labor market to challenge the conventional wisdom of a universal exporter wage premium. It investigates whether for German establishments an exporter...

This paper studies the relationship between trust and foreign direct investment (FDI) in a crosssection of countries. Accounting for the issue endogeneity, this paper suggests that countries with a higher level of generalized trust attract more FDI than the low-trust countries. -- trust ;...

This paper evaluates the effect of foreign takeover on wages of workers in German establishments, using rich linked employer-employee data from 2003 to 2014. To identify a causal effect of foreign takeover, we combine propensityscore matching with a difference-in-difference estimator. We find...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with unionized labor markets. By accounting for productivity differences, the model features profit and wage differentials across industries. We use this setting to study the impact of trade liberalization on employment, welfare, and...

This paper explores the effects of trade liberalization envisioned in a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. We use a new quantitative spatial trade model with consumptive and productive uses of land and inputoutput linkages. Our...