This paper explores the effects of trade liberalization envisioned in a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. We use a new quantitative spatial trade model with consumptive and productive uses of land and inputoutput linkages. Our...

We develop a framework for studying how differences in the level and/or dispersion of per-capita income affect trade structure and welfare in a two-country model. Thereby, we embed nonhomothetic preferences into a home-market model with two sectors of production and one input factor. We...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with unionized labor markets. By accounting for productivity differences, the model features profit and wage differentials across industries. We use this setting to study the impact of trade liberalization on employment, welfare, and...

In recent decades, many countries experienced both a rise in top income shares and an increase of income inequality among the top earners. In this paper, I study the role of international trade as a catalyst for this development and analyze the associated welfare effects. I build a simple...

This paper sets up a general oligopolistic equilibrium model with multi-product firms and union wage setting in a subset of industries. By claiming a wage premium, labor unions enforce a decline in firm scale and scope and thus dampen industrial output, with negative feedback effects on the...

This paper looks inside the firm and investigates how trade alters the matching of worker-specific abilities and task-specific skill requirements. The outcome of this matching depends on how firms organize their recruitment process and how much they invest into the screening of applicants. In...

The scarcity of talent is a tremendous challenge for firms in the globalized world. This paper investigates the role of labor market imperfection in open economies for the usage of talent in the production process of firms. For this purpose, I set up a heterogeneous firms model, where production...

This paper analyzes competition for capital between welfare-maximizing governments in a framework with agglomeration tendencies and asymmetric unionization. We find that a unionized country's government finds it optimal to use tax policy to induce industry to relocate towards a location with a...

We set up a trade model with two countries, two sectors, and one production factor, which features a home-market effect due to the existence of trade costs. We consider search frictions and firm-level wage bargaining in the sector producing differentiated goods and a perfectly competitive labor...

The entry of a low-wage country into a world economy with pre-existing wage differentials puts the gains from trade in a former low-wage and then medium-wage country under pressure. If negotiations over the formation of a free trade area cover international transfers, there is a strong...