Das FIW bietet gemeinsam mit dem Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche (wiiw) regelmäßig Vorlesungen in Form eines Seminars in "International Economics" an.

Aufgrund der Covid-19 Pandemie finden die Veranstaltungen im Sommersemester 2021 als Online-Veranstaltungen statt.

 

Thursday, 4th of March 2021, 3:00 p.m. (CET)

Online Event
  

Armando Rungi (IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca)

Registration link:
https://wiiw.ac.at/predicting-exporters-with-machine-learning-online-event-er-503.html
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link, reminders and e-mail updates. The dial-in link will be sent to you shortly before the event.

Description:

The presentation is based on a paper with the same title co-authored with Francesca Micocci.
 

In this contribution, we exploit machine learning techniques to predict a firm’s ability to export. In a pure prediction framework, we train a Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) on the financial accounts of 57,021 manufacturing firms in France in the period 2010-2018. We obtain a relatively high accuracy of prediction, with a precision-recall at 0.91. Then, we show how predictions could be of help in assessing a firm-level exporting score, i.e., the distance of a firm from export status. We argue our exporting score has the potential to inform target-specific and evidence-based policies of internationalization.
 

Thursday, 18th of March 2021, 3:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event

Joseph S. Shapiro (University of California)
 

Registration link:
https://wiiw.ac.at/the-environmental-bias-of-trade-policy-online-event-er-506.html
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link, reminders and e-mail updates. The dial-in link will be sent to you shortly before the event.

Description:

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

This paper describes a new fact, then analyzes its causes and consequences: in most countries, import tariffs and non-tariff barriers are substantially lower on dirty than on clean industries, where an industry’s “dirtiness” is defined as its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per dollar of output. This difference in trade policy creates a global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions in internationally traded goods and so contributes to climate change. This global implicit subsidy to CO2 emissions totals several hundred billion dollars annually. The greater protection of downstream industries, which are relatively clean, substantially accounts for this pattern. The downstream pattern can be explained by theories where industries lobby for low tariffs on their inputs but final consumers are poorly organized. A quantitative general equilibrium model suggests that if countries applied similar trade policies to clean and dirty goods, global CO2 emissions would decrease and global real income would change little.
 

Dieses Seminar findet im Rahmen des FIW-Projekts statt, das vom österreichischen Bundesministerium für Digitalisierung und Wirtschaftsstandort (BMDW) gefördert wird.
 

Thursday, 25th of March 2021, 4:00 p.m. (CET)

Online-Event
  

Yoto V. Yotov (Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA)

Registration link:
https://wiiw.ac.at/from-theory-to-policy-with-gravitas-a-solution-to-the-mystery-of-the-excess-trade-balances-online-event-er-505.html
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent shortly before the event.
 

Description:

This presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Gabriel Felbermayr (Kiel Institute & Kiel University).
 

Bilateral trade balances often play an important role in the international trade policy debate. Academic economists understand that they are misleading indicators of competitiveness and of the gains from trade. However, they also recognize their political relevance, calling for accurate statistical measurement and for more scholarly work. Disturbingly, Davis and Weinstein (2002) argue that the canonical gravity model of trade fails when confronted with bilateral trade balances data, dubbing this "The Mystery of the Excess Trade Balances''. Capitalizing on the latest developments in the theoretical and empirical gravity literature, we demonstrate that the workhorse international trade model actually performs well in explaining bilateral trade balances. Moreover, in our data, only 11 to 13% of the variance in bilateral balances is due to asymmetric bilateral trade costs, belying beliefs that bilateral imbalances are driven by 'unfair' manipulation of terms-of-trade. We also perform several general equilibrium experiments within the same structural gravity framework to show that free trade agreements tend to exacerbate bilateral imbalances and that macroeconomic rebalancing leads to adjustment with all trade partners.

Thursday, 8th of April 2021, 4:00 p.m. (CET)

Online-Event
  

Ronald B. Davies (University College Dublin)
 

Registration link:
https://wiiw.ac.at/patent-boxes-and-the-success-rate-of-patent-applications-online-event-er-508.html
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent shortly before the event.

Description:

The presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Ryan Hynes and Dieter F. Kogler.
 

Patent boxes significantly reduce the tax rate applied to income earned from a patent. Existing work finds that those reductions increase the number of patents. That said, not all patents are equally novel. In particular, the patent box encourages the submission of patents of marginal novelty, a selection effect that would reduce the average success rates of patents. At the same time, the increased return to patenting encourages additional effort in innovation development and application preparation, increasing success rates. While this predicts an ambiguous effect, by exploiting the time dimension of these responses, we are able to examine their relative size. Using data from applications to the European Patent Office from 1978 to 2017 and find that the introduction of a patent box increases the average success rate of applications from the large innovators who make up the majority of applications by 6.9 percentage points. This impact only materializes two years after a patent box takes effect, suggesting that improved research effort is the dominant response by rms.

Thursday, 29th of April 2021, 4:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event
   

Francesco Fasani (Queen Mary University of London)

Registration link:
https://wiiw.ac.at/border-policies-and-unauthorized-flows-evidence-from-the-refugee-crisis-in-europe-online-event-er-504.html
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent shortly before the event.

Description:

This presentation is based on a paper co-authored with T. Frattini.
 

In this paper, we first describe the size, composition and characteristics of the recent unauthorised migration flows through external European Union borders. We then assess the eff ectiveness of EU border enforcement policies in deterring or diverting migration flows across alternative routes. Our empirical analysis is based on a novel dataset of Frontex records on attempted illegal crossing by quarter, country of origin and route of entry in Europe for the period 2009-2017. These records arematched with a dataset - that we assembled - on the monthly EU budget spent on border enforcement and search and rescue operations on each route of entry. Our empirical analysis is threefold. First, we document the existence of a political cycle in enforcement spending at the external EU borders which is orthogonal to expected  ows. Second, we use this result as a first stage to deal with the endogeneity of border policies and retrieve the causal impact of enforcement on unauthorized flows. Third, we analyse the eff ect of outsourcing border controls to a non-EU transit country (the 2016 EU-Turkey deal) on deterrence and diversion of unauthorized flows.

Thursday, 6th of May 2021, 4:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event
   

Alejandro Cuñat (University of Vienna)

Registration link:
https://wiiw.ac.at/bilateral-trade-imbalances-online-event-e-516.html
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent shortly before the event.

Description:

This presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Robert Zymek.
 

Bilateral trade imbalances are determined by aggregate trade imbalances, production and expenditure patterns, and trade barriers. We calibrate a dynamic many-sector trade model to match the recent sectoral trade and production shares of 40 economies and the rest of the world. Through a variance decomposition and counterfactuals, the model allows us to assess the relative importance of these determinants for the observed variation in bilateral imbalances. Large pairwise asymmetries in residual trade “wedges” are needed for the model to match the data. These account for roughly 60% of the variation, with most of the rest due to differences in production and expenditure patterns. Aggregate trade imbalances play a minor role. A counterfactual trade policy which eliminates trade-wedge asymmetries would have sizeable effects on bilateral trade patterns and welfare. However, it would leave aggregate trade balances virtually unchanged.
 

Thursday, 10th of June 2021, 3:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event
   

Matt Burke (Bennett Institute for Public Policy and University of East Anglia)

Registration link:
https://wiiw.ac.at/rising-temperatures-falling-ratings-the-effect-of-climate-change-on-sovereign-creditworthiness-online-event-e-518.html
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent shortly before the event.

Description:

The presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Klusak, P., Agarwala, M., Kraemer, M. and Mohaddes, K.

Enthusiasm for 'greening the financial system' is welcome, but a fundamental challenge remains: financial decision makers lack the necessary information. It is not enough to know that climate change is bad. Markets need credible, digestible information on how climate change translates into material risks. To bridge the gap between climate science and real-world financial indicators, we simulate the effect of climate change on sovereign credit ratings for 108 countries, creating the world's first climate-adjusted sovereign credit rating. Under various warming scenarios, we find evidence of climate-induced sovereign downgrades as early as 2030, increasing in intensity and across more countries over the century. We find strong evidence that stringent climate policy consistent with limiting warming to below 2oC, honouring the Paris Climate Agreement, and following RCP 2.6 could nearly eliminate the effect of climate change on ratings. In contrast, under higher emissions scenarios (i.e., RCP 8.5), 63 sovereigns experience climate-induced downgrades by 2030, with an average reduction of 1.02 notches, rising to 80 sovereigns facing an average downgrade of 2.48 notches by 2100. We calculate the effect of climate-induced sovereign downgrades on the cost of corporate and sovereign debt. Across the sample, climate change could increase the annual interest payments on sovereign debt by US$ 22-33 billion under RCP 2.6, rising to US$ 137-205 billion under RCP 8.5. The additional cost to corporates is US$ 7.2-12.6 billion under RCP 2.6, and US$ 35.8-62.6 billion under RCP 8.5.