The paper takes a first look at the host and home country effects of German FDI in Eastern Europe (EE) based on new survey data of 1050 investment projects in EE by 420 German multinationals during the 1990s. We find that German investors transfer a substantial amount of financial capital to EE....

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

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in levels of per capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

Europe is reorganizing its international value chain. I document these changes in Europe’s international organization of production with new survey data of Austrian and German firms investing in Eastern Europe. I show estimates of the share of intra-firm trade between Austria and Germany on...

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...

This paper is a reply to Barry Ickes' critique of my paper “Trust versus Illusion: What is Driving Demonetization in Russia?” in which I show that the data reject Barry Ickes' Virtual Economy explanation of barter in Russia in favor of an institutional explanation based on the lack of trust.

In this paper we analyze the conditions under which a foreign direct investment (FDI) involves a net capital flow across countries. Frequently, foreign direct investment is financed in the host country without an international capital movement. We develop a model in which the optimal choice of...

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 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...