International Economics

Project description:

The aim of the project is to study the impacts of forced displacement on labor markets in four countries: Colombia, Ethiopia, Jordan and Uganda. The case studies will generate quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence on three interconnected themes:

1) Assessing the impact of refugees on the labor markets; 
2) Understanding coping strategies adopted by the hosts in refugee-hosting areas; and
3) Shedding light on the importance of refugees’ socio-economic integration and the right to work in refugee-hosting economies.

The quantitative analysis will be based on both primary and secondary data. Based on the four case studies, the overarching objective of the project is to draw global policy recommendations and implications for dealing with new displacement in low- and middle-income countries.

 

Project description:

This project examines the interaction between globalization and populism in a large set of countries and over long time periods, using a variety of methods and data. We consider the effects of both exposure to international trade and migration as dimensions of globalization, and differentiate the effects of low-skilled or high-skilled trade and migration on populism. We study how globalization affects differentially right-wing and left-wing populism, as well as how populist and nonpopulist parties evolve as a response to globalization.

 

Project description

The project develops a methodology to identify the determinants of long-run changes in comparative advantage across countries. These changes affect the specialization patterns of a country, and have deep consequences for workers and rms as they come with substantial adjustment costs. The project aims to better understand the sources of changes in comparative advantage, and to help the evaluation of policies designed to accompany them.

 

 

Project description

The process of globalization, and market integration more generally, has created winners and losers, across regions of the world, but also within regions across various individuals and producers, both in developed and developing countries. The traditional recommendation by economists has been to create conditions that allow ‘smooth’ structural adjustments, such that those who lose can move to sectors or occupations that gain, or that at least losers are compensated. While this is rather straightforward “in theory”, in practice costs and benefits of restructuring are not easy to identify and redistribute in real time, which may create substantive losses even in the medium term.

In this project we plan to improve on both the measurement and empirical analysis of the heterogeneous impact of globalization using unique and rich micro-data, at the rm-, region-, and household-level. Throughout the different parts and working packages of our project, we focus on measurement and a more detailed micro- analysis, to identify the heterogeneous effects across a variety of settings, and we do so with a modern view of globalization and market integration — i.e., that trade is more than a mere ow of goods between countries, as traditionally modeled in international trade theory. Firms, the mix of workers they employ to produce a set of differentiated products, and the globally spread production process is central in the analysis. We therefore focus on all three relevant margins of globalization: rms, households and space (cities) in this project.

The different working packages (WPs) share a common focus on micro-data and empirical analysis through state-of-the art micro-econometric techniques, that in part have been developed by the PIs of this project. We rely on a combination of new, and unique detailed datasets which have either been collected by other organizations, or by our own research teams. The coverage of the data and the project is global and local at the same time. The overall project will cover many countries, both rich and poor; but the focus of the specific working packages is local which is inherent in the use of detailed micro-data.

Project description

The project develops a framework to analyze the economic consequences of deep trade agreements. This new generation of trade agreements, such as the ones signed between the EU and Japan or the EU and Canada (CETA) go much beyond traditional tariff reductions and have at their core the dismantling of many non-tariff barriers. These raise a number of questions about regulatory convergence, the recognition of foreign standards (e.g. should hormone-fed beef be allowed for consumption) and investment protection. Many in the public debate fear a loss of national sovereignty, implying a lower consumer protection and unfair competition to local, high-quality producers. Most existing trade models are ill-equipped to address these questions as they restrict trade liberalization to be similar to a reduction in tariffs. Our project addresses these shortcomings by considering quality standards as a legitimate way to curb consumption or production externalities, and not only as a way to protect the national industry. In this setup, we derive the conditions under which new trade agreements are welfare improving, and provide guidance as to when countries should mutually recognize their standards or not. We also address the role of new trade agreement for international tax competition.

Project description

The recent refugee crisis placed migration policy in the forefront of the global policy debate. World economy trends suggest that there may be further episodes of large-scale migration in the future. In this context, GLOBMIG is a 48-month project that aims at developing stronger conceptual tools to better understand and model global migration patterns. It has assembled a team of economists, demographers, lawyers, and computer scientists around three objectives: (i) to gain understanding of the long-run root drivers of international migration and of their complex interactions with the socio-demographic, climatic, institutional and economic environments, (ii) to produce integrated projections of migration, population, and global inequality, and (iii) to use the knowledge base to assess the effectiveness and policy coherence of the legal framework. Despite considerable improvements in the recent literature, little is known about the root drivers of long- run trends in the size and structure of migration, about the interplay between internal and international migrations, or about the effects of policy reforms on migration ows and about their coherence with other policies. GLOBMIG aims at shedding light on these issues. It goes beyond the state of the art in combining traditional and innovative sources of data (e.g., big data on cell-phone owners’ mobility, worldwide opinion surveys on migration intentions, geo-referenced data on population changes, comparative data on immigration laws and policies), and in developing new methodologies for processing and analyzing them (e.g., data mining, machine learning, migration accounting models). The project is divided into two phases and six work packages. In the rst “designing phase” of the project, general modelling tools will be developed, the inventory and assessment of migration laws and policies will be produced, and the exploratory analyses of innovative data sources will be conducted. In the second “operational phase” (24 months), we will produce specific knowledge on the links between international migration, internal migration, migration policies, demo-economic changes, climatic factors and conflicts.

Publications