The paper analyses sectoral patterns of intra-Asian trade for selected Asian countries as well as for sub-regions within Asia. Beyond a general trend towards manufactures, it reveals remarkable differences in specialisation profiles between lagging South Asian countries still concentrating on...

This paper analyzes how international rules are established and stabilized, i.e. how an international institutional order develops. Rules emerge mainly through learning from negative experience and serve to reduce transaction costs. The paper looks at mechanisms that stabilize rule systems, at...

This paper studies the concept of an international economic order, i.e. an institutional arrangement of international rules. Such rules emerge from negative experiences – historical disasters – that inflict severe hardship on people. A taxonomy for rules reducing transaction costs is...

In the last decades, foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased strongly among industrialised countries. U.S. companies were the first to set up foreign affiliates followed later by companies from smaller industrialised countries. This paper develops a general equilibrium model of...

This paper uses micro-data from the World Bank Investment Climate Surveys 2002-2006 to investigate how foreign ownership and access to external finance affect the likelihood of manufacturers in emerging markets to export and/or import. Applying propensity score matching to control for...

This paper develops a two-tier oligopoly model in which the entry of a multinational firm results in technology transfer to its local suppliers and also impacts the degree of backward linkages in the local industry. The model endogenizes the multinational’s choice between anonymous market...

I present a model of international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), where FDI is comprised of greenfield FDI and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Working in a monopolistically competitive environment, merging firms do not reduce competition. Mergers are motivated by efficiency gains and...

National and multinational companies coexist in many sectors of all developed countries. However, economic models fail to reproduce this fact because of the assumption of symmetry between companies. To show that the symmetry assumption is the reason for this failure, a two-country general...

This paper discusses environmental policies in response to foreign direct investment (FDI) in a symmetrie two-country setting, where firms' behavior affects government policy decisions. We show that two alternative equilibria with FDI are possible: (i) one with unilateral FDI, where one firm is...

In the presence of increasing specialization of workers it becomes more and more difficult for firms to find the most suitable workers. In such an environment a multinational corporation has an advantage because it can exchange workers between plants in different countries. In this way it can...