Cheap Imports and the Loss of US Manufacturing Jobs

This study examines the role of international trade and specifically imports from low‐wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor‐proportions‐inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms in trade, we build industry‐level measures of import competition. Combining worker data from the Longitudinal Employer‐Household Dynamics data set, detailed establishment information from the Census of Manufactures and transaction‐level trade data, we find that rising import competition from China and other developing economies increases the likelihood of job loss among manufacturing workers with less than a high school degree; it is not significantly related to job losses for workers with at least a college degree.     

Specific features of regional budget policy using the example of Novosibirsk oblast

The paper elicits the conditions for developing the financial base of local self-government and examines the breakdown of local budgets in Novosibirsk oblast. The author has analyzed the inhomogeneity characteristics of budget indicators before and after the municipalities were granted financial resources from the oblast budget and assessed cross-territorial differentiation in the fiscal capacity of Novosibirsk oblast municipalities. The paper analyzes the connection between grants, municipality taxes, and nontax revenues and assesses the marginal effect of an increase in taxes going to the local budgets.     

Foreign Investors in The Netherlands: Heterogeneous Employment and Productivity Effects

Recent academic research suggests that the effects of inward foreign direct investment for productivity and employment may vary across foreign investors with different characteristics. Using a newly created dataset that integrates micro-level information from The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency and Statistics Netherlands, this paper explores the role of several of these characteristics, including e.g. the country of origin, activities and tasks, age and strategic role of foreign affiliates in The Netherlands in the 2000–2007 period. Our analysis shows that important employment and productivity differences exist for nearly all these dimensions.