Does Outsourcing to Central and Eastern Europe Really Threaten Manual Workers’ Jobs in Germany?

Starting from the observation of significant within‐industry skill‐upgrading, this paper analyses how international outsourcing has affected the relative demand for manual workers in German manufacturing during the 1990s. We combine trade and input‐output data to disentangle international outsourcing and trade in final goods and differentiate between the effects of narrowly and broadly defined outsourcing towards Central and Eastern Europe (CEEC), the European Union (EU15) and the rest of the world. Accounting for the endogeneity of international outsourcing by applying instrumental variable techniques, the empirical analysis showed that international outsourcing is indeed an important explanatory factor for the observed decline in relative demand for manual workers in German manufacturing. Particularly, outsourcing towards CEEC plays a major role, irrespective of whether a narrow or wide measure of outsourcing is applied. Using a narrow outsourcing measure and controlling for the adverse demand effects of skill‐biased technological change, time‐changing industry characteristics, wages as well as industry unobserved characteristics, international outsourcing towards CEEC is found to have lowered the manual workers’ wage bill share by 2.7 per‐centage points between 1991 and 2000. In its magnitude this effect is comparable to the skill‐biased effect of technological progress, as captured by our controls. Outsourcing towards countries outside CEEC and outside the EU15 is found to have small negative effects on the relative demand for manual workers, but only if one follows the broad definition of international outsourcing. Outsourcing towards the EU15 is, however, always found to be insignificant.     

Economics of undersea resources

The open seas have recently become recognized as a major resource on which the world is likely to grow increasingly dependent in the years ahead. With regard to their exploitation questions of efficiency and equity have arisen that are being fought out primarily within the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea the sixth round of which ended last month, once again without any concrete results. Professor Walter explains what is at stake.     

How much of the diversification discount can be explained by poor corporate governance?

We investigate whether the diversification discount occurs partly as an artifact of poor corporate governance. In panel data models, we find that the discount narrows by 16% to 21% when we add governance variables as regression controls. We also estimate Heckman selection models that account for the endogeneity of diversification and dynamic panel generalized method of moments models that account for the endogeneity of both diversification and governance. We find that the diversification discount persists even with these controls for endogeneity. However, in selection models the discount disappears entirely when we introduce governance variables in the second stage, and in dynamic panel GMM models the discount narrows by 37% when we include governance variables.     

How persistent is private equity performance? Evidence from deal-level data

The persistence of returns is a critical issue for investors in their choice of private equity managers. In this paper, we analyse buyout performance persistence in new ways, using a unique database containing cash flow data on 13,523 portfolio company investments by 865 buyout funds. We focus on unique realized deals and find that persistence of fund managers has substantially declined as the private equity sector has matured and become more competitive. Private equity has, therefore, largely conformed to the pattern found in most other asset classes in which past performance is a poor predictor of the future.     

Inhumane Arbeitsbedingungen auf dem globalen Markt — Wer kann, wer soll handeln?

Workers in Asian factories producing for Western markets suffer under inhumane working conditions. Suicides at Chinese suppliers of computer manufacturers and a fire in a Bangladesh garment factory recently drew public attention to this problem. But would workers in developing countries really benefit from better working conditions and higher wages? It may be more likely that countries implementing these improvements would lose in global competition. Therefore, developing countries are limited in their ability to raise labour standards on their own. This competitive situation, however, is the very reason why labour rights have to be negotiated internationally. Existing voluntary international standards of the UN, ILO or OECD are useful but not sufficient, and trade sanctions in the WTO framework pose dangers of disguised protectionism. More promising but still imperfect avenues are Free Trade Agreements that could be used to enforce minimum ILO labour standards and transparent certifications, e.g. for fair trade products.     

Do labour market institutions matter? Micro-level wage effects of international outsourcing in three European countries

This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countries with markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark. To do so we use individual-level data sets for the three countries and construct comparable measures of outsourcing at the industry level, distinguishing outsourcing by broad region. We discuss some possible intuitive reasons for why there may be differences in the impact of outsourcing across the three countries, based on labour market institutions.     

Constructing Generalized FGM Copulas by Means of Certain Univariate Distributions

In this paper we focus on specific generalized Fairlie- Gumbel-Morgenstern (or Sarmanov) copulas which are generated by a single function (so-called generator or generator function) defined on the unit interval. In particular, we introduce a class of generators based on density-quantile functions of certain univariate distributions. Many of the generator functions from the literature are recovered as special cases. Moreover, two new generators are suggested, implying to new copulas. Finally, the opposite way around, it is shown how to calculate the univariate distribution which belongs to a given copula generator function.     

III. Weltwirtschaft und Wirtschaft einzlner Länder und Gebiete

Ohne Zusammenfassung