Documents Larch, Mario 5 results

"The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is the most significant trade policy initiative since the Uruguay Round (1986 to 1994). It would create a free trade zone covering 45% of world GDP. However, critics dismiss the possible welfare gains as small compared to the risks. In this paper, we provide results based on a structurally estimated general equilibrium trade model. Assuming that the TTIP will reduce transatlantic trade costs by as much as existing bilateral agreements have reduced trade costs between their trade partners, we find that a TTIP could result in very substantial gains for Germany (+3.5%), Europe (3.9%), and the world (+1.6%), but that it could also harm third countries."

"Against the backdrop of the considerable increase in protectionist measures that could be observed during the recent fi nancial crisis, this article investigates the following questions: Are “Buy National” clauses a suitable instrument to internalise the externality that arises because the stimulating effect of “general”, non-discriminatory government spending is distributed among many countries, while the cost of the stimulus is borne by only one country? Are shortterm trade policies, like import tariffs, export subsidies and “Buy National” policies, suitable policies to mitigate an economic downturn?"

"We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention to the role of income effects and shows that bad institutions in one country worsen labor market outcomes not only in that country but also in its trading partners. This spill-over effect is conditioned by trade costs and country size: smaller and/or more centrally located nations suffer less from inefficient policies at home and are more heavily affected from spill-overs abroad than larger and/or peripheral ones. We offer empirical evidence for a panel of 20 rich OECD countries. Carefully controlling for institutional features and for business cycle comovements between countries, we confirm our qualitative theoretical predictions. However, the magnitude of spill-over effects is larger in the data than in the theoretical model. We show that introducing real wage rigidity can remedy this problem."

"Unilateral climate policy suffers from carbon leakage, i.e. the (partial) offset of the initial emission reduction by increases in other countries. Different than most typically discussed climate policies, degrowth not only aims at reducing the fossil fuel use in an economy, but rather (besides other social and political goals) at a reduction of all factor inputs, which may lead to different leakage implications. We conduct the first investigation of degrowth in a multi-country setting in order to (i) compare the leakage effects of national pure emission reduction policies to degrowth scenarios, (ii) identify underlying channels by decomposing the implied emission changes into scale, composition, and technique effects, and (iii) investigate which country characteristics determine degrowth's relative effectiveness to overcome the leakage problem. Using a structural gravity model, we find that degrowth indeed significantly reduces leakage by keeping the sectoral composition of the country more stable and reducing uncommitted countries' incentives to shift towards more energy-intensive production techniques. The higher effectiveness of degrowth in reducing carbon emissions is most pronounced for small and trade-open economies with comparatively clean production technologies."