Publications

Nearly a decade after the 2015 emissions scandal, Volkswagen has transitioned from marketing deceptive `clean engine cars´ to becoming a major player in the electric vehicle market. Yet, the violation of environmental standards during the scandal resulted in excessive pollutant emissions, posing persistent threats to health and the environment. This paper explores how consumers held Volkswagen accountable for these hazards. Our analysis reveals that the decline in Volkswagen's sales volumes following the scandal was driven by environmentally concerned consumers globally. However, their reaction was short-lived and mainly limited to vehicles implicated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Interestingly, we find no evidence of lost sales to competitors. Instead, we document a within-brand or within-group shift in favor of Volkswagen models compliant with environmental regulations. This phenomenon could be one of the contributing factors explaining Volkswagen's resilience in navigating the fallout from the scandal.

While managerial mobility is ubiquitously seen as an integral part of the success in firms’ internationalization, discerning its empirical merits has been impaired by the paucity of quasi-experimental evidence, or adequate instrumental variables. To overcome these objective limitations, this paper proposes a novel identification strategy, which uses a control function based on on-the-job search theory to correct estimates for the presence of self-selected mobility flows. Our analysis confirms the finding that managers' specific market experience matters for firms' internationalization, especially when it derives from longer tenures at the former jobs.
Regarding the attributes of managerial knowledge, our results reveal that on-the-job earned experience is at least as effective for firms’ internationalization as in born knowledge (i.e. origins) and that managers’ personal network of customers is an important asset in managers' fund of expertise for the expansion into new markets.

Are Born Globals really different from firms with other start-up histories? We address this question based on a unique longitudinal data set that tracks all Danish manufacturing start-ups founded between 1994 and 2008 (23,201 firms). This novel application of register data allows us to provide the first detailed account of Born Globals compared to proper control groups of other start-ups. Chiefly we investigate firm performance, which in turn permits interference on socioeconomic impact. We find that the occurrence of BGs is not specific to certain sectors, nor does their frequency change in light of rapid ICT progress. However, we find that Born Globals have significantly higher turnover and employment levels as well as job growth rates. Moreover, they show a considerably wider market reach, but little to no productivity advantage compared to firms with less or later internationalization. Thus, Born Globals are special in some but not all aspects.

Media are reporting of companies that are increasing the diversity of their workforce to expand their business internationally. This paper investigates whether these examples constitute pieces of evidence that diversity promotes firms' internationalization. Indeed, diverse companies are like a cosmopolitan world in small scale, in which their employees learn to relate to other cultures. This improves firms' relational capital and ability to market products internationally. To address endogeneity issues, we rely on several empirical strategies, one of which is centered on the well established ``shift share'' method. Our results are robust across all empirical models, confirming the hypothesis that ethnic diversity favors firms' engagement on international markets.

This study analyzes the effect of public R&D subsidies on private R&D expenditure in a sample of French firms during the period 1993–2009. We evaluate whether there is any input additionality of public R&D subsidies by distinguishing between R&D tax credit recipient and non-recipient firms. In addition, combining difference-in-differences with propensity score and exact (both simple and categorical) matching methods, we assess the effect of R&D subsidies between treated (subsidy recipients) and controls (subsidy non-recipients) as well as between differently treated (small, medium and large subsidy recipient) firms. Furthermore, we implement a dose-response matching approach to determine the optimality of public R&D subsidy provisions. We find evidence of either no additionality or substitution effects between public and private R&D expenditure. Crowding-out effects appear to be more pronounced for medium-high levels of public subsidies, and generally under the R&D tax credit regime. A number of robustness checks corroborate our main findings.

Recent studies have concluded that R&D grants can induce firms to export and that exporting and innovating can be complementary activities at the firm level. Yet the trade literature has paid little attention to the scope of innovation policy as a stimulus to both trade and innovation. To investigate this question, we rely on a general workhorse model of trade and firm heterogeneity with firm investments in R&D activities. The interplay of innovation and trade policies uncover novel results. In particular, we show that the effects of either policy depend on the degree of protectionism in a country. Therefore, countries can respond differently to the same policy, and similarly to different policies. In such a context, different governments may face different trade-offs in achieving a given target.

As the firm gravitates toward being the core in analyses of international trade, the possibilities for learning from cross-disciplines studies increase. Managerial resources underlie export initiation in the theory of the multinational enterprise developed in international business studies, but they are largely ignored in empirical studies of international trade. This is probably not because they are unimportant, but more due to the challenges of identifying and measuring these resources. We exploit Danish employer-employee matched data to overcome this challenge and analyse the impact of managers' international experience, together with other managerial characteristics, on the likelihood that the firm starts exporting. We find that productivity and fixed costs associated with exporting are not the sole determinants of selection of firms into international markets, but that `managerial inputs' are just as important. Our data allow us to identify manager export experience based on the CEO's historical career as documented in official registry statistics, a feature that makes our analysis different from other work that relies on self-assessments.

While determinants of FDI patterns have received widespread attention, the timing of their surge remains largely unexplained. According to the proximity-concentration trade-off argument, a surge in FDI in times of decaying international transportation costs seemingly represents a paradox. Besides transportation costs, other factors have contextually changed: in particular, the uncertainty that firms bear has increased. Enriching the classical choice problem of a multinational firm with insights from the literature on investment under uncertainty, we illustrate how different types of uncertainty determine the timing and optimal entry mode (i.e. FDI or export) of a multinational enterprise into a new market.

WTO negotiations deal predominantly with bound – besides applied – tariff rates. But, how can reductions in tariffs ceilings, i.e. tariff rates that no exporter may ever actually be confronted with, generate market access? The answer to this question relates to the effects of tariff bindings on the risk that exporters face in destination markets. The present paper formalizes the underlying interaction of risk, fixed export costs and firms' market entry decisions based on techniques known from the real options literature; doing so we highlight the important role of bound tariffs at the extensive margin of trade. We find that bound tariffs are more effective with higher risk destination markets, that a large binding overhang may still command substantial market access, and that reductions in bound tariffs generate effective market access even when bound rates are above current and long-term applied rates.

Using a cross-section of countries, we adapt Frankel and Romer's (1999) IV strategy to international labor mobility. Controlling for institutional quality, trade, and financial openness, we establish a robust and non-negative causal effect of immigration on real per-capita income.