The link between investment and finance usually enters the empirical literature in the form of financial constraints which are defined as the wedge between the costs of internal and external finance or as the risk of being rationed on the credit market. In this context, the sensitivity of...

Using quantile regression and a rich cross section data set for German manufacturing plants this paper documents that the impact of plant characteristics on export activities varies along the conditional size distribution of the export/sales ratio.

The paper develops a sequential migration model and derives a worker's optimal policies for migration and employment. With the worker's simulated reservation wage functions for employment and migration, a stationary equilibrium is defined. In that equilibrium, stationary distributions of...

This paper presents the first empirical test with German establishment level data of a hypothesis derived by Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple in a model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to serve foreign markets either trough exports or foreign direct investment: only the more...

The tradition of gravity models is in the analysis of trade flows with market size and geographic or economic distance as core variables. Both these variables can be important determinants of FDI, too. However, when such models are used to explain FDI, there can be differences in the mode of...

The paper addresses the linkage between certain aspects of the increasing economic integration of world markets and the level of child labour. We empirically examine, first, the often-cited conventional wisdom that multinational enterprises invest in countries where the extent of child labour is...

In this paper we find evidence that the new economic geography approach is able to describe and explain the spatial characteristics of an economy, in our case the German economy. Using German district data we estimate the structural parameters of a new economic geography model as developed by...

With the elimination of foreign exchange risk among the E.M.U.-member countries, the yield of, say, French benchmark government bonds (henceforth, the yield) should be equal to that of German bonds, plus some credit and liquidity premia. Since both premia are not likely to change substantially...

This paper starts from the stylized fact that firm size and exporting tends to be positively related. Using large sets of establishment panel data for three different industries from official statistics evidence is presented that the familiar picture of an export/sales ratio that ceteris paribus...

Recent studies of border effects have focused on the intra-country and inter-country comparison of trade flows. It is found that borders have a negative impact on the size of cross-border trade. In order to estimate border effects on a regional level one needs not only data on inter-country but...