S<sc>uedekum</sc> J., W<sc>olf</sc> K. and B<sc>lien</sc> U. Cultural diversity and local labour markets, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. The diversity of nationalities of foreign workers in the German labour market has increased considerably over the period 1995-2006. This paper investigates the effects of this diversity for native...

Using a regression analogue of the shift-share technique we address the explanatory power of various theories about regional differences in employment growth in eastern German districts from 1993 until 2001. We find that overly high regional wages are more important than differences in the...

Language is a strong and robust determinant of international trade patterns: Countries sharing a common language trade significantly more with each other than countries using different languages, holding other factors constant. In this paper, we show that this trade-promoting effect of language...

Why are better educated and more risk-friendly persons more mobile across regions? To answer this question, we use micro data on internal migrants from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 2000–2006 and merge this information with a unique proxy for region-pair-specific cultural distances...

A very prominent instrument of regional policy is to foster education and human capital for-mation in economically lagging regions. However, this type of regional policy might actually hurt instead of help the recipient areas. The reason is that individual geographical mobility increases with...

We analyze the effects of the unprecedented rise in trade between Germany and the East - China and Eastern Europe - in the period 1988 - 2008 on German local labor markets. Using detailed administrative data, we exploit the cross-regional variation in initial industry structures and use trade...

We investigate the causal impact of equity market liberalizations on sectoral export performance across 91 countries (1980 - 1997). The increased availability of external finance has boosted trade of industries that intensively use relationship-specific inputs, and lowered exports of industries...

We develop a theory of a firm in an incomplete contracts environment which decides on the complexity, the organization, and the global scale of its production process. Specifically, the firm decides i) how many intermediate inputs are simultaneously combined to a final product, ii) if the...

The world is replete with spatial frictions. Shipping goods across cities entails trade frictions. Commuting within cities causes urban frictions. How important are these frictions in shaping the spatial economy? We develop and quantify a novel framework to address this question at three...

We consider a property rights model of a firm with two heterogeneous suppliers. The headquarters determine the firm's organizational structure, and we analyze which sourcing mode (outsourcing or vertical integration) is chosen for which of the asymmetric inputs. If suppliers' investment choices...