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...

Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

We analyze tax competition between two countries of unequal size trying to attract a foreign-owned monopolist. When regional governments have only a lump-sum profit tax (subsidy) at their disposal, but face exogenous and identical transport costs for imports, then both countries will always...

We show that the static duopoly model in which firms choose between exporting and foreign direct investment is often a prisoners' dilemma game in which a switch from exporting to foreign direct investment reduces profits. By contrast, we show that when the game is repeated there is a range of...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tarif cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tarif reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage...

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and of cross-border restrictions on data flows has created a host of new questions and related policy dilemmas. This paper addresses two questions: How is digital service trade shaped by (1) AI algorithms and (2) by the interplay between AI algorithms and...

This paper provides an analysis of non-cooperative tariff-setting in the presence on foreign direct investment. We set up a two-country general equilibrium model with co-existence of exporters and horizontal multinational firms. For symmetric countries, analytical results are derived. The...

This paper provides a theoretical setup for an analysis of strategic relationships inherent to activities of an innovative multinational enterprise (MNE) and a local company in a host country. Additionally, we explore the incentives of the host country's government to provide subsidies to...

We analyze the provision of repair services (aftermarket services that are required for a certain fraction of durable units after sales) through an international duopoly model in which a domestic firm and a foreign firm compete in the domestic market. Trade liberalization in goods, if not...

Empirical evidence shows that an increase in trade liberalisation causes an increase in foreign direct investments (FDIs). Here we propose an explanation to this apparent puzzle by exploiting the intensity of competition in a Bertrand duopoly with convex costs where the two firms enter in a new...