Firm Exports, Foreign Ownership, and the Global Financial Crisis (joint with Peter Eppinger). CESifo Working Paper No 8808. Original Version: December 2020. Updated Version: December 2024. Accepted for publication at IMF Economic Review.
ABSTRACT: Foreign-owned firms strongly increased their exports in the global financial crisis compared to domestically owned firms. We document this pattern and investigate the underlying reasons using rich micro data from Spain. Specifically, we propose a triple differences identification strategy to test how the exogenous shock to credit supply in the crisis differentially affected firm exports depending on ownership and pre-crisis financial vulnerability. We find that foreign ownership significantly stabilized exports in the crisis, in particular among financially vulnerable firms. This finding squares well with a financial advantage of foreign ownership: the fact that foreign-owned firms can access foreign capital markets via their multinational parents makes their exports more resilient to deteriorating credit conditions. We find robust evidence for this credit channel, while multinationals’ distribution networks, participation in global value chains, input prices, or differential demand shocks did not play a relevant role.
Exploring the Effect of Immigration on Consumer Prices in Spain. CESifo Working Paper No 11097. April 2024. R&R at Review of World Economics.
ABSTRACT: We investigate the effect of immigration on consumer prices in Spain between 1997 and 2013. Using variation across provinces, we first document a positive correlation between consumer prices and the share of migrants in the population. However, controlling for regional supply and demand shocks, and addressing endogeneity through an instrumental variables approach, we show that immigration has actually reduced consumer prices in Spain. An increase in the share of migrants by 10 percentage points reduces (CPI-weighted) consumer prices by approx. 1.25 percent. We show that the effect materializes around the years of the 2008 financial crisis, and that it is concentrated among non-tradable goods and services. Focusing on individual products, we find that some of those products that rely most heavily on migrant labor have been subject to considerable price reductions, while we find no such effects for those products that make intensive use of native labor. Finally, we find that it is immigration from outside Western Europe that led to a reduction in consumer prices, while the effect of immigration from Western Europe is zero. Overall, our results paint a complex picture of the effects of immigration on consumer prices. They support the idea that immigration can reduce consumer prices through both supply-side and demand-side channels.
Trade, Automation, and Educational Mismatch (joint with Majda Seghir). March 2024.
ABSTRACT: The question of how trade and automation impact labor markets is much studied, yet little is known about the effects on the “correct” matching between jobs and workers with different levels of education. We conduct an empirical analysis into the impact of trade and automation on educational mismatch across 11 Western European countries between 2002 and 2018. To do so, we measure educational mismatch at the occupational level using realized matches from the European Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS). To identify the effects of trade and automation, we exploit the emergence of Eastern Europe as a central trade partner for Western Europe along with the unprecedented rise of robots as important sources of variation in the data. We construct exposure measures based on the pre-determined weight of occupations in industries most heavily involved in trade and automation, and address endogeneity concerns using third-country trade and robots as instruments. We find some evidence that exports and imports affected matching differently, while automation caused an increase in the share of workers that are mismatched (overeducated for the work they do).
Processing Firms (joint with Boris Georgiev).
Robots and Firms (joint with Michael Koch and Ilya Manuylov), Economic Journal, 131(638), August 2021, 2553-2584.
Winner of the 2021 Royal Economic Society Prize.
Productivity and Firm Boundaries (joint with Wilhelm Kohler), European Economic Review, 135, June 2021, 103724.
Foreign Ownership and Skill-biased Technological Change (joint with Michael Koch), Journal of International Economics, 118, May 2019, 84-104.
The Great Trade Collapse and the Spanish Export Miracle: Firm-level Evidence from the Crisis (joint with Peter S. Eppinger, Nicole Meythaler, and Marc-Manuel Sindlinger), The World Economy, 41(2), February 2018, 457-493.
Networks and Selection in International Migration to Spain (joint with Nina Neubecker and Anne Steinbacher), Economic Inquiry, 55(3), July 2017, 1265-1286.
Trade Policy Preferences and Factor Abundance (joint with Ina C. Jäkel), Journal of International Economics, 117, May 2017, 1-19.
Global Sourcing and Firm Selection (joint with Wilhelm Kohler), Economics Letters, 124(3), September 2014, 411-415.
Co-national and Cross-national Pulls in International Migration to Spain (joint with Nina Neubecker), International Review of Economics & Finance, 28, October 2013, 51-61.
Individual Attitudes Towards Trade: Stolper-Samuelson Revisited (joint with Ina C. Jäkel), Open Economies Review, 24(4), September 2013, 731-761.
Global Sourcing: Evidence from Spanish Firm-level Data (joint with Wilhelm Kohler), in: Quantitative Analysis of Newly Evolving Patterns of International Trade, ed. by Robert M. Stern. World Scientific Studies in International Economics, May 2012, chapter 4, 139-189.
Sourcing Premia with Incomplete Contracts: Theory and Evidence (joint with Wilhelm Kohler), B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 11(1), January 2011, 1-37.