Suchergebnisse

Recent theoretical literature studies how labor market reforms in one country can affect labor market outcomes in other countries, thereby rationalizing widely-held policy beliefs and empirical evidence. But what is the quantitative relevance of such spillover effects? This paper combines two recent workhorse models: the canonical search-and-matchingframework and the heterogeneous firms international trade model. Qualitatively, the framework confirms that labor market reforms in one country benefit its trading partners, replicating the stylized facts. However, when wages are bargained flexibly, the model quantitatively underestimates the correlation of structural unemployment rates across countries. This mirrors the well-known finding by Shimer (2005) by which thestandard search-and-matching model predicts too small fluctuations of unemployment rates over time. Introducing real wage rigidity remedies this problem.

Reportedly, firms often find it impossible to finance large and long-term projects despite positive net present values. Should governments step in and can their assistance be effective? This paper studies the case of public export credit guarantees in Germany. Covering the default risk of exporters' foreign customers, the policy is supposed to enable funding of international business opportunities that would otherwise remain unexploited. Using German firm-level data covering the universe of publicly insured firms for the years 2000 to 2010, this study tests for the causal effect of guarantees on sales and employment. It employs a difference-in-differences strategy combined with a matching approach, to create an appropriate control group of untreated firms. It finds that guarantees increase firm-level sales and employment on average by about 4.5 and 3.0 percentage points, respectively. During the financial crisis of 2008/09, effects turn out larger. These findings suggest the presence of credit constraints and provide an argument justifying the observed government intervention.

With ever-increasing political tensions between China and Russia on one side and the EU and the US on the other, it only seems a matter of time until protectionist policies cause a decoupling of global value chains. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium trade model calibrated with the latest version of the GTAP database to simulate the effect of doubling non-tariff barriers - both unilateral and reciprocal - between the two blocks on trade and welfare. Imposing trade barriers almost completely eliminates bilateral imports. In addition, changes in price levels lead to higher imports and lower exports of the imposing country group from and to the rest of the world. The targeted country group increases exports to the rest of the world and reduces imports. Welfare falls in all countries involved, suggesting that governments should strive to cooperate rather than turning away from each other. By imposing a trade war on Russia, the political West could inflict severe damage on the Russian economy because of the latter's smaller relative size.

In theoretical trade models with variable markups and collective wage bargaining, exportexposure may reduce the exporter wage premium. We test this prediction using linkedGerman employer-employee data from 1996 to 2007. To separate the rent-sharingmechanism from assortative matching, we exploit individual worker information toconstruct profitability measures that are free of skill composition. We find that rentsharingis less pronounced in more export intensive firms or in more open industries.The exporter wage premium is highest for low productivity firms. In line with theory,these findings are unique to the subsample of plants covered by collective bargaining.

Many European countries restrict immigration from new EU member countries. The rationale is to avoid adverse wage and employment effects. We quantify these effects for Germany. Following Borjas (2003), we estimate a structural model of labor demand, based on elasticities of substitution between workers with different experience levels and education. We allow for unemployment which we model in a price-wage-setting framework. Simulating a counterfactual scenario without restrictions for migration from new EU members countries, we find moderate negative wage effects, combined with increased unemployment for some types of workers. Wage-setting mitigates wage cuts.