In their famous paper on the "Big Push", Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in this paper an oligopoly model of the Big Push that is very close in spirit to the Murphy-Shleifer-Vishny (MSV) model, but in contrast to the MSV model it is easily extended to the case of an economy that is open to international trade. Having a workable open-economy framework allows us to address the question whether globalisation makes it easier or harder for a country to escape from a poverty trap. Our model gives a definite answer to this question: Globalisation makes it harder to escape from a poverty trap since the adoption of the modern technology at the firm level is impeded by tougher competition in the open economy.

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Gegenstand der Arbeit ist das Leben sowie das Werk des ersten russischen mathematischen Ökonomen Vladimir Karpovic Dmitriev (1868-1913). Es werden alle bekannten Schriften Dmitrievs vorgestellt und eine Einführung und Interpretation seines wirtschaftstheoretischen Hauptwerkes, den „Ökonomischen Essays“ (1898/1902), angeboten. Daneben erfolgt eine Beschreibung seiner Stellung innerhalb der russischen Nationalökonomie sowie eine Würdigung im Kontext der westlichen Volkswirtschaftslehre. Dabei werden die bis dato zu Dmitriev gewonnenen Erkenntnisse integriert, vertieft und kritisch hinterfragt. Auskünfte zur russischen Geschichte sowie die Erläuterung landestypischer Begriffe erleichtern das Verständnis der Dmitriev’schen Positionen. Es zeigt sich, dass Dmitriev allen gesundheitlichen und materiellen Widrigkeiten zum Trotz eine beachtliche wissenschaftliche Leistung vollbrachte: Er gelangte zu Erkenntnissen, die seiner Zeit um Jahrzehnte voraus waren und deren Relevanz bis in die Gegenwart reicht. Nicht nur trug er zu einem verbesserten Verständnis der klassischen Theorie bei und nahm damit einige Elemente der Forschung in den 1950/60er Jahren vorweg, Pionierleistungen erbrachte er ebenfalls für die Input-Output-Analyse sowie auf dem Gebiet der unvollkommenen Konkurrenz.

Gegenstand der Arbeit ist das Leben sowie das Werk des ersten russischen mathematischen Ökonomen Vladimir Karpovic Dmitriev (1868-1913). Es werden alle bekannten Schriften Dmitrievs vorgestellt und eine Einführung und Interpretation seines wirtschaftstheoretischen Hauptwerkes, den Ökonomischen Essays (1898/1902), angeboten. Daneben erfolgt eine Beschreibung seiner Stellung innerhalb der russischen Nationalökonomie sowie eine Würdigung im Kontext der westlichen Volkswirtschaftslehre. Dabei werden die bis dato zu Dmitriev gewonnenen Erkenntnisse integriert, vertieft und kritisch hinterfragt. Auskünfte zur russischen Geschichte sowie die Erläuterung landestypischer Begriffe erleichtern das Verständnis der Dmitrievschen Positionen. Es zeigt sich, dass Dmitriev allen gesundheitlichen und materiellen Widrigkeiten zum Trotz eine beachtliche wissenschaftliche Leistung vollbrachte: Er gelangte zu Erkenntnissen, die seiner Zeit um Jahrzehnte voraus waren und deren Relevanz bis in die Gegenwart reicht. Nicht nur trug er zu einem verbesserten Verständnis der klassischen Theorie bei und nahm damit einige Elemente der Forschung in den 1950/60er Jahren vorweg, Pionierleistungen erbrachte er ebenfalls für die Input-Output-Analyse sowie auf dem Gebiet der unvollkommenen Konkurrenz. (Version bis auf persönliche Daten identisch mit Vorgängerversion, siehe Dokumente und Dateien.)

Left-hand drive (LHD) vehicles share higher road accident risks under left-hand traffic because of blind spot areas. Due to low import prices, the number of wrong-hand drive vehicles skyrockets in emerging countries like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Russia. I identify the causal effect of wrong-hand drive vehicles on road safety employing a new “backward version” of the synthetic control method. Sweden switched from left-hand to right-hand traffic in 1967. Before 1967, however, almost all Swedish vehicles were LHD for reasons of international trade and Swedish customer demand. I match on accident figures in the period after 1967, when both Sweden and other European countries drove on the right and used LHD vehicles. Results show that right-hand traffic decreased road fatality, injury and accident risk in Sweden by approximately 30 percent. An earlier switch would have saved more than 4,000 lives between 1953 and 1966.

Total factor productivity (TFP) growth allows for additional health care services under restricted resources. We examine whether hospital policy can stimulate hospital TFP growth. We exploit variation across German federal states in the period 1993 to 2013. State governments decide on hospital capacity planning (number of hospitals, departments and beds), ownership, medical students, and hospital investment funding. We show that TFP growth in German hospital care reflects quality improvements rather than increases in output volumes. Second-stage regression results indicate that reducing the length of stay is generally a proper way to foster TFP growth. The effects of other hospital policies depend on the reimbursement scheme: under activity-based (DRG) hospital funding, scope-related policies (privatization, specialization) come with TFP growth. Under fixed daily rate funding, scale matters to TFP (hospital size, occupancy rates). Differences in capitalization in East and West Germany allows to show that deepening capital may enhance TFP growth if capital is scarce. We also show that there is less scope for hospital policies after large-scale restructurings of the hospital sector.

We set up a general equilibrium model, in which offshoring to a low-wage country can lead to job polarisation in the high-wage country. Job polarisation is the result of a reallocation of labour across firms that differ in productivity and pay wages that are positively linked to their profits by a rent-sharing mechanism. Offshoring involves fixed and task-specific variable costs, and as a consequence it is chosen only by the most productive firms, and only for those tasks with the lowest variable offshoring costs. A reduction in those variable costs increases offshoring at the intensive and at the extensive margin, with domestic employment shifted from the newly offshoring firms in the middle of the productivity distribution to firms at the tails of this distribution, paying either very low or very high wages. We also study how the reallocation of labour across firms affects economy-wide unemployment. Offshoring reduces unemployment when it is confined to high-productivity firms, while this outcome is not guaranteed when offshoring is also chosen by low-productivity firms.

The paper shows that taking inventory control out of the hands of retailers and assigning it to an intermediary increases the value of a supply chain when demand volatility is high. This is because an intermediary can help solve two incentive problems associated with retailers\' inventory control and thereby improve the intertemporal allocation of inventory. Adding an intermediary as a new link in a supply chain is also shown to reduce total inventory, to make shipments from the manufacturer less frequent and more variable in size, as well as to reduce social welfare.

We investigate the effect of general-purpose transfers on different expenditure categories and tax rates in the municipalities of Saxony (eastern Germany) and North Rhine-Westphalia (western Germany). Findings from the panel data analysis suggest the existence of the “flypaper effect” – municipalities use transfers to increase expenditures but do not reduce taxes. For most expenditure subcategories the estimated coefficients are alike, suggesting similarity of spending priorities in the two federal states despite the differences in the transfer dependency. Targeted support of eastern municipalities could potentially explain few identified differences in the spending behavior.

In their famous paper on the "Big Push", Murphy, Shleifer, and Vishny (1989) show how the combination of increasing returns to scale at the firm level and pecuniary externalities can give rise to a poverty trap, thereby formalising an old idea due to Rosenstein-Rodan (1943). We develop in this paper an oligopoly model of the Big Push that is very close in spirit to the Murphy-Shleifer-Vishny (MSV) model, but in contrast to the MSV model it is easily extended to the case of an economy that is open to international trade. Having a workable open-economy framework allows us to address the question whether globalisation makes it easier or harder for a country to escape from a poverty trap. Our model gives a definite answer to this question: Globalisation makes it harder to escape from a poverty trap since the adoption of the modern technology at the firm level is impeded by tougher competition in the open economy.