Global Sourcing Decisions and Firm Productivity: Evidence from Spain

We investigate the link between productivity of firms and their sourcing behavior. Following Antràs & Helpman (2004) we distinguish between domestic and foreign sourcing, as well as between outsourcing and vertical integration. A firm’s choice is driven by a hold-up problem caused by lack of enforceable contracts. We use Spanish firm-level data to examine the productivity premia associated with the different sourcing strategies. We find strong empirical support for the predictions of the model.productivity, outsourcing, intra-firm trade, foreign direct investment, incomplete contracts, firm-level data

Individual attitudes towards trade: Stolper-Samuelson revisited

This paper studies to what extent individuals form their preferences towards trade policies along the lines of the Stolper-Samuelson logic. We employ a novel international survey data set with an extensive coverage of high-, middle-, and low-income countries, address a subtle methodological shortcoming in previous studies and condition on aspects of individualenlightenment. We find statistically significant and economically large Stolper-Samuelson effects. In the United States, being high-skilled increases an individual's probability of favoring free trade by up to twelve percentage points, other things equal. In Ethiopia, the effect amounts to eight percentage points, but in exactly the opposite direction. --Trade policy,Voter preferences,Political economy

Essays on International Trade and Factor Flows

This thesis consists of eight self-contained essays on international trade and factor flows. In these essays, I address three topics that center around the following questions: What determines the boundaries of the firm in the global economy? What type of migration can countries expect to receive in the future, depending on their current migration profile? Can the labor market effects of protection explain individual attitudes towards international trade? In the first part of this thesis (Chapters 2, 3, and 4), I use firm-level data from Spain in order to investigate the boundaries of the firm in the global economy. Roughly one-third of world trade is intra-firm trade. Its distribution across countries and across sectors is not random, but responds to some underlying structural features of the economy. In this thesis, I look into the distribution of intra-firm trade across firms, and I show that it is systematically related to the productivity of the firm. The Spanish data set that I use is exceptionally rich in terms of firms' sourcing activities. It records whether a firm acquires inputs within the firm or at arm's length, and it does so separately for the inputs acquired in the Spanish economy and, if applicable, for the inputs imported from a foreign economy. This allows me to provide novel insights into the behavior of firms in terms of where and how they acquire their inputs in the global economy. In the second part of this thesis (Chapters 5, 6, and 7), I use Spanish migration data to study network externalities in the international migration of people. Network externalities occur when already settled migrants provide help in the migration endeavors of those left behind. This reduces the costs of migration for those left behind, which means that a country's current endowment with migrants will have an impact on the type of migration countries can expect to receive in the future. I use publicly available administrative migration data from Spain, in order to shed light on this phenomenon in a recent migration boom to Spain. I shall inform about the extremely fascinating period from the mid-1990s up to the rise of the Global Financial Crisis in 2007/08. Within a little more than a decade, Spain received about six million new migrants, and its total population surged from less than 40 million people to more than 45 million people. In the history of humans, there are arguably not many examples of a similarly dramatic influx of people into a country over such a short period of time. In the third part of this thesis (Chapters 8 and 9), I study whether the labor market effects of protection can explain individual attitudes towards international trade and protection. Trade economists point out that liberalizing trade unlocks welfare gains (the gains from trade) through a more efficient use of resources and more products becoming available in the countries involved. However, free trade also has the potential to benefit some groups in a society at the expense of others. This might explain why some people and countries hold more sympathetic views towards free trade than others. In this thesis, I relate individual preferences towards international trade and protection to the factor price effects of protection in the neoclassical trade model. For this purpose, I draw on large-scale survey data on public opinion derived from two different sources: the 2005 wave of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and the 2007 wave of the Pew Global Attitudes Project (GAP)

Co-national and Transnational Networks in International Migration to Spain

This paper provides evidence that transnational networks, defined as networks operating across nationalities, are shaping observed patterns of international migration. In a stylized model of migration with random friendship formation, individuals from a given origin country are attracted to destinations hosting large migrant communities from countries which are culturally and geographically close to their own origin country. In addition, the attracting force of a large community of co-national migrants is the larger, the larger the community of migrants from other culturally proximate countries in the same destination. Both predictions are supported by aggregate migration data on international migration to Spain, detailed by origin country and destination province. Our findings imply that the literature estimating network effects in migration has been overly restrictive in its definition of migrant networks

Global Sourcing and Firm Selection

Which firms find it optimal to integrate their input suppliers into the firm boundaries of control (vertical integration)? Which firms choose to expand their sourcing activities across the national border (offshoring)? This letter provides novel evidence on these questions based on a Spanish firm-level data set. We find that firms selecting into strategies of vertical integration and of offshoring tend to have been more productive ex ante than firms choosing not to do so. This finding is in line with the recent heterogeneous-firm literature on input sourcing under incomplete contracts

Individual Attitudes Towards Trade: Stolper-Samuelson Revisited

This paper studies to what extent individuals form their preferences towards trade policies along the lines of the Stolper-Samuelson logic. We employ a novel international survey data set with an extensive coverage of high-, middle-, and low-income countries, address a subtle methodological shortcoming in previous studies and condition on aspects of individual “enlightenment”. We find statistically significant and economically large Stolper-Samuelson effects. In the United States, being high-skilled increases an individual’s probability of favoring free trade by up to twelve percentage points, other things equal. In Ethiopia, the effect amounts to eight percentage points, but in exactly the opposite direction

Networks and Selection in International Migration to Spain

This paper analyzes the role of ethnic communities in shaping the recent immigration boom to Spain. We find that ethnic communities exerted a strong positive effect on the scale and a strong negative effect on the skill structure of this immigration. Unlike previous studies, we explicitly acknowledge similarities among final migration destinations and thus partly relax the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption. We strengthen our causal interpretation by controlling for observed and unobserved heterogeneity in bilateral migration costs, and by adopting an instrumental variables approach. Our results suggest that previous estimates of the scale effect are upward-biased by approximately 50%

Development of a Metal-Based Lightweight Approach Consisting of Cold-Formable Magnesium Sheets in Combination with a Multi-Purpose Powder Coating System

This paper will give an overview about the development of a material system, which consists of a novel formable magnesium alloy that is provided with an effective corrosion protection coating. The corrosion protection is to be realized in the form of a forming stable powder coating, which can be applied in the coil coating process. To improve the tribological properties, additional additives are added to the powder coating. Within this paper, first results concerning tribological and forming behavior of the new lightweight material system are given. For the benchmark, the results are compared with commercially available AZ31 Mg alloy

The Great Trade Collapse and the Spanish Export Miracle: Firm-level Evidence from the Crisis

We provide novel evidence on the micro-structure of international trade during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession by exploring a rich firm-level data set from Spain. The focus of our analysis is on changes at the extensive and intensive firm-level margins of trade, as well as on performance differences (jobs, productivity, and firm survival) across firms that differ in their export status. We find no adverse effects of the financial crisis on foreign market entry or exit, but a considerable increase in the export intensity of firms after the financial crisis. Moreover, we find that exporters were more resilient to the crisis than non-exporters. Finally, while exporters showed a significantly more favorable development of total factor productivity after 2009 than non-exporters, aggregate productivity declined substantially in a large number of industries in Spanish manufacturing. We also briefly explore two factors that might help explain the surprisingly strong export performance of Spain in the aftermath of the great trade collapse: improved aggregate competitiveness due to internal and external devaluation and a substitutive relationship between domestic and foreign sales at the firm level

Human subcortical brain asymmetries in 15,847 people worldwide reveal effects of age and sex

The two hemispheres of the human brain differ functionally and structurally. Despite over a century of research, the extent to which brain asymmetry is influenced by sex, handedness, age, and genetic factors is still controversial. Here we present the largest ever analysis of subcortical brain asymmetries, in a harmonized multi-site study using meta-analysis methods. Volumetric asymmetry of seven subcortical structures was assessed in 15,847 MRI scans from 52 datasets worldwide. There were sex differences in the asymmetry of the globus pallidus and putamen. Heritability estimates, derived from 1170 subjects belonging to 71 extended pedigrees, revealed that additive genetic factors influenced the asymmetry of these two structures and that of the hippocampus and thalamus. Handedness had no detectable effect on subcortical asymmetries, even in this unprecedented sample size, but the asymmetry of the putamen varied with age. Genetic drivers of asymmetry in the hippocampus, thalamus and basal ganglia may affect variability in human cognition, including susceptibility to psychiatric disorders