The seminar is part of the activities of FIW, the Centre of Competence in International Economics. Regular lecture series on current issues in international economics.

Location: wiiw Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Wien

Thursday, 23 June 2016, 4pm

wiiw Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna, Library (2^nd floor)

Alyssa Schneebaum
(with Miriam Rehm, Katharina Mader and Katarina Hollan)

Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU)

Abstract

This paper studies the gap in wealth holdings between male and female single households using 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey data for 10 European countries. The analysis employs OLS and quantile regressions and ?nds that there is no wealth gap across most of the wealth distribution, but that male households have between 30% and 76% more net wealth than female households at the very top of the distribution. Differences in labor market characteristics, in particular earnings and the ownership of business assets, explain much of the difference in the gender wealth gap between the 70^th and 90^th percentiles.

Keywords:    Gender; Wealth; Wealth Gap; Distribution

JEL Codes:  D31; J16; E21.

Thursday, 19 May 2016, 4pm

wiiw Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna, Library (2^nd floor)

Yoshinori Shiozawa

Osaka City University, Japan

Abstract

A few people imagined that a new theory of international values emerges about 200 years after Ricardo’s Principles. The talk starts from the new interpretation of Ricardo’s four magic numbers. After a brief account of the new theory, it extends to some of its consequences. They include topics like global supply chains, fragmentations of production processes, and trade frictions caused by rapid liberalisation.

Speaker

Yoshinori Shiozawa is Professor Emeritus at Osaka City University. He is the second president and a fellow of the Japan Association for Evolutionary Economics. He is one of the pioneers of complexity economics and a leader in evolutionary economics. He succeeded in building a new theory of international values in his book A Final Solution of the Ricardo Problem on International Values (in Japanese, 2014). All his English papers can be found on ResearchGate.

Thursday, 14 April 2016, 4pm

wiiw Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna, lecture hall (ground floor)

Johannes Boehm (with Swati Dhingra and John Morrow)

SciencesPo Paris

Abstract

Multiproduct firms dominate production, and their product turnover contributes substantially to aggregate growth. Firms continually adapt their product mix, but what determines which products firms expand into? Theories of the firm propose that multiproduct firms choose to make products which need the same know-how or inputs that can't be bought `off the shelf'. We empirically examine this rationale by testing for firm-level capabilities that are shared across products and manifested through input-output (IO) linkages. We show that a firm's idiosyncratic horizontal and vertical similarity to a product's IO structure predicts product adoption. Using product-specific policy changes for a firm's inputs and outputs, we show that input linkages are the most important, suggesting that firms' product capabilities depend more on economies of scope rather than product market complementarities.

Keywords:    Multiproduct firms, product adoption, vertical linkages, horizontal linkages

JEL Codes:    L1, L2, M2, O3.

Working Paper