This paper studies the eff ects of foreign competition on self-employment levels. We begin by pointing out a previously unknown fact: the greater the exposure to foreign competition, the smaller the fraction of self-employed people. This fact holds across very different countries, across...

This paper examines the distributional effects of international trade in a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and a welfare state redistributing income. The redistribution scheme is financed by a progressive income tax and gives the same absolute transfer to all individuals....

This volume was prepared by Benedikt Heid while he was working at the ifo Institute and the University of Bayreuth. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. It includes six self-contained...

This paper is concerned about addressing a question that has become critical in international trade, during the past three decades: "What factors explain the worldwide increase in skill premiums following international trade integration and increasingly globalized economies"? I propose a new...

This paper develops a framework for studying the effects of higher trade openness on the wage distribution that emphasizes within-industry labor reallocation across firms, strong skill-productivity complementarities in production and heterogenous fixed export costs across firms. Assuming no...

We study how financial frictions affect firm-level heterogeneity and trade. We build a model where productivity differences across monopolistically competitive firms are endogenous and depend on investment decisions at the entry stage. By increasing entry costs, financial frictions lower the...

Firms play a critical role in the global economy. In this paper, we survey the behavior of firms in the international economy, both in theory and in the data. We first summarize the key empirical facts that motivate the study of firms in trade. Then, we detail recent theoretical developments on...

This paper uses cross-country data to examine the long-term effect of trade openness on the gender gaps in wages, education, political empowerment and health. Key findings are: trade openness since 1970 reduced the gender gaps in wages and educational attainment as of 2011 but did not influence...

This paper focuses on how gender segmentation in labor markets shapes the local effects of international trade. We first develop a theoretical framework that embeds trade and gender-segmented labor markets to show that foreign demand shocks may either increase or decrease the female-to-male...