Trade, technology, and unemployment: the role of endogenous skill formation

Abstract .  This paper analyses trade in an asymmetric  2 × 2 × 2  world, where the two countries ('Europe' and 'America') differ in their preferences towards wage inequality. Fair wage considerations compress wage differentials in both countries. European workers are more averse to wage inequality, and Europe is characterized by lower wage differentials and higher unemployment. Allowing for endogenous skill formation, the effects of a globalization shock, global technological change, and a change in the educational capital stock on skill premia and employment levels are derived. In contrast to a model with exogenous factor supplies, international wage and unemployment differentials are affected by global shocks.     

The Inside Track: On the Important (But Neglected) Role of Customers in the Resource‐Based View of Strategy and Firm Growth*

abstract This paper argues for the important role of customers as a source of competitive advantage and firm growth, an issue which has been largely neglected in the resource‐based view of the firm. It conceptualizes Penrose's (1959 ) notion of an ‘inside track’ and illustrates how in‐depth knowledge about established customers combines with joint problem‐solving activities and the rapid assimilation of new and previously unexploited skills and resources. It is suggested that the inside track represents a distinct and perhaps underestimated way of generating rents and securing long‐term growth. This also implies that the sources of sustainable competitive advantage in important respects can be sought in idiosyncratic interfirm relationships rather than within the firm itself.     

Trade and the Environment: The Role of Firm Heterogeneity

In this paper, we derive a new effect of trade liberalization on the quality of the environment. We show that in the presence of heterogeneous firms, the aggregate volume of emissions is influenced by a reallocation effect resulting from an increase in the relative size of more productive firms. The relative importance of this reallocation effect and the scale effect well‐known from the literature is affected by the emission intensity at the firm level. Domestic emissions decrease as a result of a unilateral tariff reduction if and only if firm‐specific emission intensity decreases strongly with increasing firm productivity. As a result of the induced change in foreign emissions, domestic pollution can increase even if domestic emissions decrease.     

Transparency in the interbank market and the volume of bank intermediated loans

In the present paper we study the equilibrium interaction through which the interbank market is related to the public lending and borrowing market. It turns out that this interaction is affected by the transparency in the interbank market. Interbank market transparency is modeled by means of more informative signals about future interbank rates. We find that more transparency might increase or decrease the volume of bank intermediated loans in the public market. In particular, the impact of more transparency on the volume of loans depends on the curvature of the marginal cost function of the banking firm. Furthermore, we find that expected profits of the bank are higher when the interbank market is more transparent.