This paper documents that tax havens play a prominent role in international service trade and investigates the nature of this role. We employ a firm-level dataset with detailed information about service trade and foreign affiliates for virtually all multinational firms in Germany, which allows...

How do financial development and financial integration interact? We focus on Japan's Great Recession after 1990 to study this question. Regional differences in banking integration affected how the recession spread across the country: financing frictions for credit-dependent firms were more...

Using a two-factor (labor and capital), two-good (shift-working and non shiftworking commodities) model with two countries (Home and Foreign) which are located in different time zones, we highlight the impact of trade in labor services (via communication networks) on the comparative advantage of...

The issue of low-wage competition in services trade involving posted workers is controversial in the EU. Using Swedish survey data, people's attitudes are found to be more negative to such trade than to goods trade. The differences depend on both a preference for favouring social groups to which...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

In this fascinating new field, this paper offers some reflections on portability of social benefits, and tries to identify promising research topics. These reflections are organized in three sections. The first analyzes the channels that underpin the positive value of portability of social...

A structural gravity model is used to estimate barriers to services trade across many sectors, countries and time. Since the disaggregated output data needed to flexibly infer border barriers are often missing for services, we derive a novel methodology for projecting output data. The empirical...

We propose a two-country monopolistic competition model of business service offshoring that captures the advantage conferred by time zone differences. We emphasize the role of the entrepreneurs, who decide how to produce business services (i.e., domestic service provision or service offshoring)....