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...

Theoretical models of growth reveal that either exogenous or endogenous, technology is the main driving force behind the long-run economic growth. Furthermore, in the endogenous growth framework, diffusion of technology is the basic mechanism of per capita income convergence among countries....

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...

This article presents a Ricardian model of trade with learning-by-doing to study the effect of barriers to trade in products with low growth potential on the long-run economic growth. The model shows that, when elasticity of demand for the product with a lower learning potential is greater than...

In a two-country reciprocal dumping model, with one country unionized, we analyze how wage setting and firm location are influenced by trade liberalization. We show that trade liberalization can induce FDI, which is at odds with conventional theoretical wisdom and cannot happen in a...

This paper sounds a caution to international trade economists, demonstrating that the equilibrium trade imbalances implied by most models of international investment disturb the symmetry between import tariffs and export taxes found by Lerner (1936). When trade is unbalanced, Lerner's...

The recent vote by Britain to quit European Union (EU) and the political pressures in some member countries to exit EU necessitates a critical evaluation of the long-run economic benefits of economic integration or union to member countries. Consequently, this paper examines recent empirical...

Despite extensive research, the estimates of changes in employment are heter-ogeneous in different conditions of economic development. In this study, we examined the impact of the instability of economic growth on the elasticity of the labour market in a set of EU27 member states in the period...

An establishment can improve its productivity by hiring workers from more productive establishments. Then, how important is worker reallocation for aggregate productivity growth? To study this question, I develop a general equilibrium model where knowledge transmits as workers reallocate from...

We use the case of EU enlargement in 2004 to investigate the impact of economic integration on regional income growth. Being particularly interested in studying the effects ‘at the margin’, we track the relative performance of regions adjacent to both sides of the integration border...