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, the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna.

Monday, 10 February 2020, 4:00 p.m.
wiiw, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna
  

Predictability of Financial Crises: The Impact of Fundamental, Policy-induced and Institutional Vulnerabilities on China Compared to other Emerging Markets

Sebastian Petric, RBI and University of Oxford

The presentation is based on a book with the same title.

Paper and presentation, when available, are posted online after the seminar.

Keywords: China, emerging markets, financial crises, exchange rate volatility

JEL classification: G01, G15, F31, F44

Donnerstag, 30. Jänner 2020, 15 Uhr
wiiw, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna
   

Structural change in the Chinese economy and changing trade relations with the world

Eddy Bekkers, World Trade Organisation

he presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Robert Koopman and Carolina lemos Rego.  

This paper examines the impact of structural change in China, in particular a reduction in the savings rate, an increase in the share of skilled workers, and an increase in productivity in technologically advanced manufacturing sectors targeted by Made in China 2025. Baseline projections until 2040 are generated with the WTO Global Trade Model, a dynamic computable general equilibrium model. With the modelled structural changes the Chinese economy is projected to reorient its focus increasingly onto the domestic economy, raising the share of private household and government consumption in GDP, turning China’s trade surplus into a trade de?cit, reducing China’s share in global exports, raising the share of services in both production and exports, shifting the destination markets of Chinese exports from developed to developing countries, and changing its pattern of comparative advantage away from sectors like light and heavy manufacturing to electronic and machinery equipment. The large bilateral trade surplus vis-a-vis the United States is projected to fall to almost zero.
 

Paper and presentation, when available, are posted online after the seminar.

Keywords: Dynamic CGE-Modelling, Structural Change, China

JEL classification: F14, F43, I25

Link CEPR Discussion Paper

Montag, 2. Dezember 2019, 15:00 Uhr

wiiw Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna

Talents from Abroad. Foreign Managers and Productivity in the United Kingdom

Dimitrios Exadaktylos, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

Please note: the Event was originally announced under the title: "The Impact of Foreign Managers on Productivity: Evidence from the United Kingdom"

The presentation is based on a paperco-authored with Massimo Riccaboni and Armando Rungi.

This paper tests the contribution of foreign management on firms' productivity. We show that a domestic firm becomes more productive after hiring at least one foreign manager. Productivity gains from foreign managers in domestic firms (about 10%) are similar in magnitude to productivity gains from foreign acquisitions in previous literature. Interestingly, we do not find any significant productivity gains when foreign management is hired by foreign-owned firms. We argue that recruiting talents from abroad constitutes an alternative to exploit international technological spillovers. For our purpose, we use a novel data set on the careers of 165,084 managers working for 13,106 companies in the United Kingdom in the period 2009-2017. Our identification strategy includes both a difference-in-difference analysis and a matching technique to challenge reverse causality. Results are robust when we measure firms' competitiveness either by total factor productivity or by technical efficiency after stochastic frontier analyses. Eventually, our findings suggest that limits to managers’ mobility, as for example in the case of a Brexit event, may hamper the allocation of labor productive resources.

Keywords: Managers, productivity, job mobility, spillovers, multinational enterprises, migration

JEL classification: F22, F23, L21, L23, L25, M11

Thursday, 28 November 2019, 3:00 p.m.

wiiw Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna

Donnerstag, 28. November 2019, 15:00 Uhr

wiiw Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna

Bringing it all back home? Backshoring of manufacturing activities and the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies

Bernhard Dachs, Austrian Inistitute of Technolog

 The presentation is based on a paperco-authored with Steffen Kinkel and Angela Jäger.

We investigate the relationship between backshoring of production activities and digital manufacturing technologies, also known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0). We argue that I4.0 supports backshoring because it provides a higher productivity and ?exibility which o?ers an incentive for ?rms to locate production close to their European customers.
The empirical test is based on a large dataset of 1700 manufacturing ?rms from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Backshoring is still a rare event with a share of around 4% of all ?rms. Descriptive statistics as well as regression results indicate a positive correlation between the adoption of I4.0 technologies and companies’ backshoring propensity

.

Keywords: Backshoring, O?shoring, Industry 4.0, Technology

JEL classification: F23, F6, L6, O33

Thursday, 10 October 2019, 3:00 p.m.
wiiw, Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna

Offshoring and Non-Monotonic Employment Effects across Industries in General Equilibrium

Michael Irlacher, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz

The presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Daniel Baumgarten and Michael Koch.

We address the mismatch between existing theoretical models and standard empirical practice in the analysis of the labor market effects of offshoring. While theory focuses on one-sector or two-sector models, empirical studies exploit variation in offshoring across a large number of industries, typically including a linear offshoring term in the analysis. Thereby, these studies implicitly assume a monotonic relationship between offshoring and labor market outcomes and ignore general-equilibrium effects across industries. We analyze the effects of offshoring across a continuum of industries with different shares of offshorable tasks that are linked through labor and capital markets in general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE). Our main result is that offshoring generates a hump-shaped pattern of employment changes across industries. While the relocation effect reduces employment in offshoring-intensive industries, labor demand in industries with a high prevalence of domestic production falls because of rising domestic wages and firm exits in general equilibrium. In the empirical part, we test the non-monotonic employment effects across industries in response to an offshoring shock by focusing on Germany after the fall of the Iron Curtain. We find strong empirical support for the hump shape in the changes of employment across industries with different scopes for offshoring, which is almost entirely due to the extensive margin, underscoring the importance of establishment entry and exit. Finally, we discuss important implications for empirical and theoretical research arising from our study.
 

Paper and Powerpoint presentation, as far as available, are posted on this page after the seminar.

Keywords: Offshoring and employment; Task offshoring; Industry heterogeneity; General oli- gopolistic equilibrium

JEL classification: F12, F16, F23, J23, L13

We kindly ask you to register for the event. Participation is free of charge.

Registration

Thursday, 31 October 2019, 3:00 p.m.

wiiw Rahlgasse 3, 1060 Vienna

Price Competitiveness in the European Monetary Union

Andreas Eder, BOKU Vienna

 The presentation is based on a paperco-authored with Wolfgang Koller and Bernhard Mahlberg.

This  paper  studies  the  persistent  producer  price inflation  differentials  within  the  European Monetary Union. By applying a decomposition procedure within the input output framework, the drivers of sectoral producer price inflation in a representative sample of member states are re-vealed. We find that in the pre-crisis period (2000-2008) the inflation differentials in manufactur-ing and market services of all countries vis-à-vis Germany were consistently positive resulting in a loss of price competitiveness for all economies. Manufacturing and market service sectors of many countries continued to lose price competitiveness, though to a lesser extent, also during the crisis period (2009-2014). We observe that differences in unit labour cost developments across countries constitute an important driver, especially in the pre-crisis period. Other drivers, such as import costs, intermediate input costs and operating surpluses also contribute, in particular during the crisis period.

Andreas Eder is Assistent Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Economic Development at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences and Institute for Industrial Research, Vienna (BOKU).

Powerpoint presentation, as far as available, will be posted on this page after the seminar.

Keywords: European Integration, Producer Price Inflation, Real Exchange Rates, Gross Output Price Deflators, National Accounts

JEL classification: D57, E31, F15, O57