This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tarif cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tarif reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage...

This paper examines how IT influences global sourcing decisions. It develops a theoretical model to study how IT determines the decisions of firms located in the high-wage North whether to offshore production to a low-wage country in the South. Offshoring to South however is subject to costly...

We develop a model in which multinational investors decide about the modes of organization, the locations of production, and the markets to be served. Foreign investments are driven by market-seeking and cost-reducing motives. We further assume that investors face costs of control that vary...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of oshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses territorial...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques,...

In this paper, we incorporate offshoring of labor-intensive goods in a model with multi-product firms, and explore its implications in partial and general oligopolistic equilibrium. We identify important aspects of this phenomenon and argue that improvements in offshoring opportunities can...

In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior...

Exchange rate exposure of firms diminishes when imported intermediates and exports are denominated in currencies that move together. Appreciations of the domestic currency, raising foreign currency export prices, then also reduce marginal costs, allowing firms to counter the increase in foreign...

Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of talent as the new stakeholder in the firm. This paper examines the role of trade integration for the changing nature of the corporation. International trade leads to a 'war for...

Corporate organization varies within a country and across countries with country size. The paper starts by establishing some facts about corporate organization based on unique data of 660 Austrian and German corporations. The larger country (Germany) has larger firms with flatter more decentral...