Identifying the impact of local firm concentration on individual firm performance is likely to produce a selection bias related to the positive effects of local concentration if agglomeration economies and natural advantages coincide. We overcome this problem by exploiting exogenous variation...

This paper documents a robust empirical regularity: in the long-run, higher trade openness is associated with a lower structural rate of unemployment. We establish this fact using: (i) panel data from 20 OECD countries, (ii) cross-sectional data on a larger set of countries. The time structure...

Using data from U.S. commodity flow survey, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between U.S. states by about 13%. The finding is robust over econometric models, survey waves, or aggregation levels. Including contemporaneous controls, such as network...

This paper characterizes analytically the optimal tariff of a large one-sector economy with monopolistic competition and firm heterogeneity in general equilibrium, thereby extending the small-country results of Demidova and Rodríguez-Clare (JIE, 2009) and the homogeneous firms framework of Gros...

Eintrag für die Universitätsbibliographie

We shed new light on the relative importance that schools’ ability to produce high achievers in math has for economic growth. Drawing on data from the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), the world championship in mathematics for high school students, we construct a measure for a...

We experimentally compare standard two-player trust games to three-player trust games, where two trustors compete for one trustee. We argue that a competitive environment could affect how the trustors’ behaviour is perceived by the trustee. If two trustors compete for the favour of a trustee,...

We test whether new firms locate close to incumbent firms of the same industry. Tendencies to coagglomerate may explain the general wisdom that industry location is highly persistent over time. We perform separate analysis for East and West Germany which enables us to study two integrated areas...