We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

This paper uses an oligopoly model with heterogeneous firms to examine how an industry adjusts to rising import competition. The model predicts that in the short run the least efficient firms in the industry become inactive, surviving firms face a fall in output, mark-ups and profits, and the...

In this paper we want to shed some light on the empirical relevance of the new economic geography. Using one of the central features of the core new economic geography models, namely that wages have the tendency to fall the further one moves away from centres of economic activity, we investigate...

Inheritance taxes may induce heirs to discontinue family firms. Because firm dissolution incurs transaction costs, a preferential tax treatment of transferred family businesses seems to be desirable from a macroeconomic viewpoint. The support of dynastic succession, however, entails also a cost...

Increasing wage inequality between similar workers plays an important role for overall inequality trends in industrialized societies. To analyze this pattern, we incorporate directed labor market search into a dynamic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and homogeneous workers....

We review and interpret the main theoretical developments in the gravity literature from its very early, a-theoretical applications to the latest structural contributions. We also discuss challenges and implement methods to estimate empirical gravity equations. We finish with a presentation and...

Multinational labor demand responds to wage differentials at the extensive margin, when a multinational enterprise (MNE) expands into foreign locations, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates across locations. We derive conditions for parametric and nonparametric...

This paper analyzes the relevance of firm losses for tax revenues and welfare when switching from separate accounting to a system of tax base consolidation with formula apportionment. We find that a system change unambiguously decreases tax revenues in the short run, in which neither firms nor...

Using aggregate data on U.S. multinational firms' activities, we document the impact of tax havens on the organization and trade of multinational firms. Conventional wisdom says that MNEs set up foreign sales platforms close to large markets to benefit from the proximity to consumers. We show,...

Most existing empirical evidence on the impact of profit taxation on multinational firm activity is based on cross-country data. One major drawback of such data is that countries differ not only with regard to taxes but along other dimensions which might be hard to capture by means of observable...