Suchergebnisse

Corruption plays a significant role in how (un)attractive a country is to skilled workers. Rather than focusing on education or immigration policies, governments ought first to tackle corruption in the labour market if they want to attract international talent.

Goods and services have been generally analyzed as two different items in the consumer portfolio supplied by firms in separate industries. In this paper, we challenge this view by providing evidence on interactions within the firm between foreign sales of goods and services. We show empirically and theoretically that demand complementarities between both activities enable firms that export goods and services - we call them bi-exporters - to boost their manufacturing exports by also providing services. The provision of services thus participates to the perceived vertical differentiation of the goods. Under monopolistic competition, adding a service boosts firms' sales only through quantities. Accounting for large oligopolistic firms uncovers instead a different channel: bi-exporting may increase firms' market power that translates into higher prices. Our IV estimates show the price channel to be important. These results imply that ignoring such complementarities will lead to a mis-quantification of the welfare and business consequences of economic integration.

In this paper we study how international trade in goods and services interact at the firm level. Using a rich dataset on Belgian firms for the period 1995–2005, we show that: i) firms are much more likely to source services and goods inputs from the same origin country rather than from different ones; ii) joint imports are associated with higher firm productivity; iii) increases in barriers to imports of goods reduce firm-level imports of services from the same market, and conversely. We build upon a discrete-choice model of goods and services input sourcing that can reproduce these facts to guide our econometric strategy. We use our results to quantify the impact of reductions in goods and services barriers between the US and the EU. Our findings have important implications for the design of trade policy. They suggest that a liberalization of services trade can have direct and sizable effects on goods trade, and vice versa. Moreover, liberalizing goods and services trade jointly brings substantial complementarities.