This paper analyses the link between offshoring in German plants and the offshoring potential of their employees. We use information on the offshoring potential of jobs from representative task data and merge it with linked employer-employee data, for which information on different modes of offshoring behaviour is available. We empirically identify individual and plant-level determinants of off...

This paper employs a distribution dynamics approach to examine the empirical dynamics of technological specialisation in industrial countries. Using patent data, cross-sectional distributions at different time periods and Markov stochastic kernels are estimated nonparametrically for each country. Three are the main findings. There is a strong country size effect: economically “large” countries ...

Using a bilateral trade equation derived from a monopolistic competition model, we investigated market access reciprocity in food trade among the US, Canada, the EU and Japan. We explore country and industry–specific market access asymmetry through the border effect approach, re-challenging the underlying main explanations. Our findings reveal marked asymmetry in reciprocal trade openness; inde...

Productivity and Size of the Export Market: Evidence for West and East German Plants, 2004 Using unique recently released nationally representative high-quality data at the plant level, this paper presents the first comprehensive evidence on the relationship between productivity and size of the export market for Germany, a leading actor on the world market for manufactured goods. It documents t...

The existence of a large border effect is considered as one of the main puzzles of international macroeconomics. We show that the border effect is, to a large extent, an artefact of geographic concentration. In order to do so we combine international flows with intranational flows data characterised by a high geographic grid. At this fine grid, intranational flows are highly localised and dropp...

This paper investigates whether differences across countries in overall country-specific trade costs affect comparative advantage. It does so by examining whether the commodity composition of countries’ trade is driven by differences in countries’ trade costs, as well as by differences in traditional factor endowments. Industry export shares across up to 71 countries and 158 manufacturing indus...

Realization of comparative advantage (David Ricardo) raises issues of income distribution that emerge when specialization gains are achieved. While the Stolper-Samuelson theorem ‘predicts’ that because of trade liberalization in ‘rich countries’ like Austria or Germany wages may fall and real incomes of capital owners might increase, some doubts are raised whether continuous cuts in relative wa...

International trade exposure affects job creation and destruction along the intensive margin (job flows due to expansions and contractions of firms’ employment) as well as along the extensive margin (job flows due to births and deaths of firms). This paper uses 1992-2010 yearly employment data from the universe of U.S. establishments to construct job flows at both the industry and commuting-zon...

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods. In line with theoretical predictions we find that...

Productivity Effects of International Outsourcing: Evidence from Plant Level Data* We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being more embedded in in...