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 alle Veranstaltungen im Wintersemester 2021/22 voraussichtlich als Online-Veranstaltungen statt.

 

Thursday, 30th of September 2021, 3:00 p.m. (CET)

Online Event
  

Tomasz Geodecki (Cracow University of Economics, Poland)

Registration link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sLHfp0-cRaydRVAsr9K1-A
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The presentation is based on a discussion paper co-authored with Marcin Zawicki.
 

Description:

Developing countries sometimes deploy local content requirements (LCRs) with a view to strengthening the capacity of domestic firms for industrial upgrading. They induce foreign lead firms to intensify cooperation with local suppliers and transfer technological knowledge in the process. The literature underscores the ineffectiveness of LCRs, as the gains for local suppliers tend to be offset by losses for final producers and consumers, yet treating LCRs as an innovation policy instrument may alter these outcomes. Taking the Chinese LCR policy pursued in 2004 2014 in the high-tech and medium-high-tech (sectors as a starting point, we intend to consider whether or not it can be replicated by the Visegrad Group countries (or the V4, i.e. the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia). Apart from natural for the EU ban on violating free trade rules, the benefits of such policy would not offset the negative effects of decreased share of foreign demand. The authors’ research hypothesis is that LCRs cannot actually become an effective tool of the V4’s economic policy. In order to test it, three auxiliary questions were formulated: (1) Did the application of LCRs contribute to value-added in the Chinese economy?; (2) What were the mechanisms of LCRs’ impact on value-added in Chinese HT&MHT sectors?; and (3) Can the V4 countries follow the Chinese development path?

 

Thursday, 07th of October 2021, 3:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event

Konstantin M. Wacker (University of Groningen, Netherlands)
 

Registration link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Dzn1pXqcSKGFXzacguGJ-g
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Presentation slides

Link to the recording

Description:

The investment income balance has become an important component of current account imbalances – magnitudes above 5% of GDP are not uncommon in major economies. This paper investigates trends, dynamics, and potential determinants of cross-border investment income flows. The essential question I explore in this paper is whether those investment income imbalances can become a substantial problem for countries in the Eurozone, which lacks the exchange rate as an adjustment mechanism for such imbalances.

I find no evidence for a particularly persistent or divergent pattern of imbalances in Euro area countries. However, investment incomes behave fundamentally different from other current account components and a negative association between the two is found exclusively for Euro area countries. This calls for a much more differentiated perspective on the current account in academic analysis and policy.

Thursday, 14th of October 2021, 4:00 p.m. (CET)

Online-Event
  

Simone Vannuccini (University of Sussex Business School, UK)

Registration link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Nch_T53NQSKm34AWeBsrvw
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Description:

The presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Philipp Mundt, Uwe Cantner, Hiroyasu Inoue, and Ivan Savin.
 

The idea that market selection promotes survival and expansion of the "fittest" producers is a key principle underlying theories of competition. Yet, despite its intuitive appeal, the hypothesis that companies with superior productivity also exhibit higher growth lacks empirical support. One reason for this is that companies are not "islands" that produce goods and services in isolation but depend on their suppliers in value chains, implying that excessive growth can also originate in the superior productive performance of these value-chain partners. Neglecting these dependencies in empirical tests of the selection hypothesis leads to measurement errors and may impair the identification of competition for the market.

In this paper, we use data from the World-Output-Database to capture these global value-chain relationships in an empirical test for market selection, studying competition between country-sectors for a global market share in different economic activities. Compared to the conventional view that focuses on individual productivities, our value-chain perspective on the productivity-growth nexus provides stronger empirical support for market selection. This suggests that the scope of selection reaches beyond the level of individual producers and requires a systemic analysis of production networks. Our findings contribute to a better understandig of the determinants of selection in competitive environments and also represent a novel application of global value-chain data.

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

Online-Event
  

Roman Hoffmann (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Austria)
 

Registration link:
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Description:

In this paper, we provide a systematic comparative analysis of climate-induced internal migration across 69 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean based on the micro census data supplied by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) International over the period 1960-2015. Using the data from 188 censuses, we construct a longitudinal database at the sub-national regional level (Geo 1 census regions) with information on bilateral migration flows between the regions. Migration is estimated based on information on the previous residence of the census participants five or ten  years prior to the respective census date (Garcia et al. 2015). In total, the data contains information on internal migration from 1600 census regions allowing us to estimate approximately 98000 bilateral migration flows.  

We use gravity-type fixed effects models to estimate internal migration flows induced by temperature and rainfall anomalies as well as drought taking into account both socioeconomic and climate drivers at the origin and destination. All models control for both region of origin as well as destination fixed effects and common time trends. We find a sizeable impact of negative precipitation anomalies, as well as weaker but significant impacts of heat anomalies and droughts on migration. Our findings furthermore suggest that also climatic conditions in destination regions influence migration flows to those regions. Fitting a series of spatial interaction models for different world regions, we find long-term heat stress increases out-migration in Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean while internal migration flows decline in Africa as the frequency of dry years increase. For the latter, the vulnerable subgroups of population may be ‘trapped’ in the place with unfavorable climatic conditions since they do not have necessary resources to facilitate outmigration (Black et al. 2013).

As next steps, we plan to extend our analysis to study not only whether and where climate-induced migration occurs,but also to better understand who migrates, under which conditions, and to which locations. For this, we will use rich information collected in the censuses about the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of migrants as well as complementary data on the conditions in the origin as well as prospective destination regions. The results of our study have important implications in the context of global policy discussions and highlight the role of contextual differences in shaping migration responses to climate change.

Thursday, 2nd of December 2021, 3:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event
   

Katharina Erhardt, Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (Germany)

Registration link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sKfBPEuoS_yyG3Ng3Pcybg
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent immediately after registration.

Description:

The presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Peter H. Egger and Sergey Nigai.

We develop a novel theory-consistent methodology that allows us to recover nonparametric firm-level productivity distributions for 15 countries and 18 sectors using data on aggregated firm-level sales.

We use these distributions against the backdrop of a multi-sector version of a standard Melitz (2003) trade model to quantify the role of technology in shaping international trade flows. We find that, on average, absolute advantage measured as productivity differences across countries within sectors explains 14% of the total variation in bilateral trade shares. In contrast, on average, comparative advantage measured as productivity differences across sectors within countries explains 43% of the variation in trade flows in the workhorse model. We also demonstrate that empirical productivity distributions entail quantitatively important micro-to-macro implications for marginal responses of trade flows to changes in trade costs, for gravity-type estimation of trade models, and for comparative statics isomorphism between the customarily parameterized models of international trade. We confirm the theoretical predictions derived under empirical productivity distributions in the data.

Thursday, 16th of December 2021, 3:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event
   

Bálint Magyar, CEU Democracy Institute (Hungary)

Registration link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vh2s-tpyTJ6P7SRKjz__BA
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent immediately after registration.

Description:

The presentation is based on a book which is open access and can be downloaded for free from the authors’ website, postcommunistregimes.com.

The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020) proposes a systematic renewal of the descriptive vocabulary used for the region’s political, economic, and social phenomena. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries, and China, this study provides concepts and theories to analyze the actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships.

Thursday, 20th of January 2022, 3:00 p.m. (CET)
Online Event
   

Walter Steingress, Bank of Canada

Registration link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wDKzA8MESkK1dir8fMZmaQ
This is an online event via Zoom. Please register for the dial-in link. The link will be sent immediately after registration.

Link to the recording

Description:

We examine the relationship between firm performance and export entry credit constraints. The existing research assumes that variation in firm financial conditions identifies credit constraints. A critical assumption is that financial conditions do not affect real outcomes (performance, exporting, or investment). To relax this assumption, we focus on the direct effect of firm fundamentals and financial conditions on firm performance. This approach distinguishes between firms who choose not to export because it is unprofitable from firms that do not export because of binding credit constraints. Our empirical specification allows firm characteristics to enter both the selection into exporting and return from exporting regressions. The leverage response heterogeneity identifies the presence of credit constraints. Using administrative Canadian firm-level data, our findings show that new exporters (a) increase their productivity, (b) raise their leverage ratio and (c) increase investment. We estimate that about 15 percent of Canadian manufacturers do not engage in export-induced productivity growth because of credit constraints.

Thursday, 17th of February 2022, 3:00 p.m. (CET)

Online Event
  

Dmitry Kuvshinov (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona=

Registration link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EJvX2UUZT420RiyhccbpmQ
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The presentation is based on a paper co-authored with Björn Richter and Kaspar Zimmermann..

Description:

This paper studies the long-run evolution of bank risk and its links to the macroeconomy. Using data for 17 advanced economies, we show that the riskiness of bank assets declined materially between 1870 and 2016. But even though bank assets have become safer, the losses on these assets are associated with increasingly large output gaps. Before 1945, bank asset returns had no excess predictive power for future economic activity, while after 1945 they have outperformed non-financials as a predictor of GDP. We provide evidence linking this increasing connectedness between banks and the macroeconomy to secular increases in financial and macroeconomic leverage.