This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

Global value chains offer countries unique opportunities to participate in and benefit from international trade by specializing in specific production stages and tasks. The objective of this study is twofold: (i) to investigate the evolution of African countries participation in global value...

Development accounting shows that a significant part of cross-country income differences is attributed to differences in total factor productivity (TFP), but the sources of TFP differences are not well understood. This paper considers the role of international trade to explain cross-country...

Trade in intermediate goods as one possible link between rising trade and foreign direct investment is examined. To explain growing intermediate goods trade, three hypotheses are brought forward: outsourcing, global sourcing and the increasing importance of MNE networks. These hypotheses are...

Three features of China's trade patterns suggest that elements beyond factor abundance explain its export performance. The high penetration in world markets of labourintensive products has been accompanied by: (i) a high share in exports of productivityadvanced foreign-owned enterprises (FIEs),...

This paper attempts to quantify the impact of fragmentation on employment. Factor demand functions for labour and intermediates and mark up price equations derived from a Generalized Leontief cost function at industry level are estimated. Import prices and output prices influence the price of...

From 1992 to 2011, the total trade volume between the U.S. and China increased by 25 times, and China's share in U.S. total imports increased from 5% to 20%. However, the U.S.'s share in China's total imports dropped from 11% to 8% in the same period. In the major categories of U.S. exports to...

This paper performs a historical analysis of Mexico's insertion into Global Value Chains (GVCs) and links it to the notion of competition underlying traditional theoretical models of international trade. In contrast with existing studies, it uses both new analytical tools pertaining to the GVC...

Although economists have long been aware of Jensen's inequality, many econometric applications have neglected an important implication of it: estimating economic relationships in logarithms can lead to significant biases in the presence of heteroskedasticity. This paper explains why this problem...

Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers following economic shocks helps to facilitate local labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We examine the role that immigration may have played in enabling U.S. commuting...