Factor Prices and Factor Substitution in U.S. Firms' Manufacturing Affiliates Abroad

Using confidential individual firm data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis survey of U.S. firms' manufacturing operations abroad, we investigate the determinants of capital intensity in affiliate operations. Host country labor cost, the scale of host country production, and the capital intensity of the parent firm's production in the United States, are all significant influences. The parent's capital intensity is the strongest and most consistent determinant of affiliate capital intensity. Affiliates that export are more sensitive to these factors in their choice of factor proportions than affiliates that sell only in their host countries.

A decorated tree approach to random permutations in substitution-closed classes

We establish a novel bijective encoding that represents permutations as forests of decorated (or enriched) trees. This allows us to prove local convergence of uniform random permutations from substitution-closed classes satisfying a criticality constraint. It also enables us to reprove and strengthen permuton limits for these classes in a new way, that uses a semi-local version of Aldous' skeleton decomposition for size-constrained Galton--Watson trees.Comment: New version including referee's corrections, accepted for publication in Electronic Journal of Probabilit

Not all foreign direct investment is foreign: the extent of round-tripping

Some foreign investment represents domestic funds that have been sent abroad before returning to the domestic economy, called round-tripping. Traditional FDI statistics do not distinguish round-tripping from genuine foreign investment. This Perspective argues for countries to produce statistics by ultimate investing country to identify the round-tripping in their economies

Hosting the FIFA World Cup: An Economic Analysis of how the World Cup has Impacted the Economy of a Developed and a Developing Nation

This thesis is a microeconomic study of the economic impact hosting the FIFA World Cup can have on both a developed and developing nation. I will examine the economies of Germany and Brazil, three years prior and three years after hosting the tournament in 2006 and 2014 respectively. The pressures imposed by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) require significant monetary investments for the World Cup to be considered successful, but have countries been allocating their resources effectively? The purpose of this thesis is to determine the extent to which it is economically advantageous for a nation to host an event of such global prestige. The study will consist of examining a series of variables that tend to be major determinants of economic growth. I will analyze the results to determine which components have the greatest impact and whether the benefits of hosting the World Cup outweigh the costs. I will conclude with providing FIFA suggestions on how to improve future World Cup hostings by alleviating costs and thus promoting economic and social equality within the host nation

Scaling and Local Limits of Baxter Permutations Through Coalescent-Walk Processes

Baxter permutations, plane bipolar orientations, and a specific family of walks in the non-negative quadrant are well-known to be related to each other through several bijections. We introduce a further new family of discrete objects, called coalescent-walk processes, that are fundamental for our results. We relate these new objects with the other previously mentioned families introducing some new bijections. We prove joint Benjamini - Schramm convergence (both in the annealed and quenched sense) for uniform objects in the four families. Furthermore, we explicitly construct a new fractal random measure of the unit square, called the coalescent Baxter permuton and we show that it is the scaling limit (in the permuton sense) of uniform Baxter permutations. To prove the latter result, we study the scaling limit of the associated random coalescent-walk processes. We show that they converge in law to a continuous random coalescent-walk process encoded by a perturbed version of the Tanaka stochastic differential equation. This result has connections (to be explored in future projects) with the results of Gwynne, Holden, Sun (2016) on scaling limits (in the Peanosphere topology) of plane bipolar triangulations. We further prove some results that relate the limiting objects of the four families to each other, both in the local and scaling limit case

The Impact of Hosting the FIFA World Cup Case Study: Developed vs Developing Nations

This thesis is a microeconomic study of the economic impact hosting the FIFA World Cup can have on both developed and developing nations. It will examine the economies of Germany and Brazil, three years prior and three years subsequent to hosting the tournament in 2006 and 2014 respectively. The pressures imposed by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) require significant investments for the World Cup to be successful, but have countries been allocating it effectively? The purpose of this thesis is to determine, from an economic point of view, the extent to which it is beneficial for a nation to host an event of such global prestige. The study will consist of examining a series of variables that tend to be major determinants of economic growth. I will analyze the results in order to determine which components have the greatest impacts and ask whether the benefits of hosting the World Cup outweigh the costs