Major technological advances have recently spurred a new wave of offshoring in services, which used to be non-tradable. Should service workers in developed countries worry about their jobs? Trade theory has given a nuanced answer to this question, suggesting that efficiency gains from offshoring may counteract direct job losses, which leaves the predicted net effect ambiguous. This paper investigates the employment effects of service offshoring in a newly combined and exceptionally detailed panel dataset, covering almost the entire universe of German firms' service imports over the years 2002-2013. It exploits firm-specific export supply shocks by partner countries and service types as an instrumental variable to find that service offshoring has increased firm employment. In line with the canonical trade in tasks model, the employment gains are greater in firms with higher initial levels of service offshoring.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractWe provide novel evidence on the micro-structure of international trade during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession exploring a rich firm-level data set from Spain. The analysis is motivated by the surprisingly strong export performance of Spain in the aftermath of the great trade collapse (dubbed by some as the "Spanish export miracle"). The focus of our analysis is on changes at the extensive and intensive firm-level margins of trade, as well as on performance differences (jobs, productivity, and firm survival) across firms that differ in their export status. We find no adverse effects of the financial crisis on foreign market entry or exit, but a considerable increase in the export intensity of firms after the financial crisis. Moreover, we find that those firms that entered the crisis as exporters (and continued exporting throughout the crisis years) were more resilient to the crisis than those firms that restricted their sales to the domestic market. Finally, in contrast to exporters, non-exporters experienced a significant deterioration in their total factor productivity, which led to an overall decline in the productivity of a significant number of industries in Spanish manufacturing.JEL classifications: F10, F14, G01, D24.

We investigate whether globalisation influenced credit market deregulation over the period 1970–2010. Globalisation is measured by the KOF indices of globalisation. Credit market deregulation is measured by the credit market freedom indicators of the Fraser Institute. The results from both cross‐sectional and panel regressions using ordinary least squares indicate a positive correlation between globalisation and credit market deregulation. We account for reverse causality using predicted trade openness as an instrumental variable and show that this approach gives rise to different conclusions. Two‐stage least squares estimations do not show that globalisation had a causal influence on credit market deregulation.

Recent disruptions to global value chains (GVCs) have raised an important question: Can decoupling from GVCs increase a country's welfare by reducing its exposure to foreign supply shocks? We use a quantitative trade model to simulate GVCs decoupling, defined as increased barriers to global input trade. After decoupling, the repercussions of foreign supply shocks are reduced on average, but some countries experience magnified effects. Across various scenarios, welfare losses from decoupling far exceed any benefits from lower shock exposure. In the U.S., a repatriation of GVCs would reduce national welfare by 2.2% but barely change U.S. exposure to foreign shocks.

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The exceptional export performance of foreign-owned firms is a well-established stylized fact, but the underlying mechanism is not yet fully understood. In this paper, we provide theory and empirical evidence demonstrating that this fact can be explained by ownership differences in access to finance. We develop a theoretical model of international trade featuring firm heterogeneity and credit market frictions in which foreign-owned firms can access foreign capital markets via their multinational parents. The model predicts a financial advantage of foreign ownership for exporting that gains importance as credit conditions deteriorate. To empirically identify this effect, we estimate a triple differences model using rich micro data from Spain that exploits the global financial crisis as an exogenous shock to credit supply. We find that foreign ownership significantly stabilized firm exports when liquidity dried out in the crisis, in particular among small and financially vulnerable firms.

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. We use an augmented gravity model to revisit the effect of similarity in income distributions on bilateral trade flows. Disentangling supply-side and demand-side mechanisms, we document a robust new regularity: while differences in average incomes between two countries increase trade, differences in income dispersion reduce it. Our result sheds new light on the Linder hypothesis and strengthens the role of non-homothetic preferences in trade theory. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL Code: F10, D31.

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