Recent literature on international trade has established that the most productive firms become multinationals. But our data reveal a startling variation in productivity levels of foreign affiliates across the countries in Eastern Europe of the same European multinational parent firms suggesting...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...

What insights can be gained from bringing the theory of the firm to the global economy? I discuss several new features of the world economy that can be explained by incorporating the theory of the firm into the theory of international trade. Among the new features I discuss are the move to...

Many people in the European Union fear that Eastern Enlargement leads to major job losses. More recently, these fears about job losses have extended to high skill labor and IT jobs. The paper examines with unique firm level data whether these fears are justified for the two neighboring countries...

Recent theories of the multinational corporation introduce the property rights model of the firm and examine whether to integrate our outsource firm activities locally or to a foreign country. This paper focus instead on the internal organization of the multinational corporation by examining the...

Feenstra and Hanson (1997) have argued in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement that US outsourcing to Mexico leads to an increase in the skill premium in both the US and Mexico. In this paper we show on the example of Austria and Poland that with the new international division...

Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities and as the emergence of human capital as the new stakeholder of the firm. This paper surveys recent work which examines the role of trade integration for these changes in corporate organization. More...

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic...