Innovation, technology diffusion, and income inequality under interdependent foreign market entry

技术是经济增长和繁荣的主要决定因素之一。为了提高生活水平，现有的技术需要改进，新技术需要发明。世界的特点是少数几个技术领先者容纳了全球大部分创新。然而，随着知识跨越行业和国界的扩散，落后国家从这种技术进步中受益。这些溢出效应影响了经济活动的分配，从而影响了世界各地的收入。这个研究项目旨在提高我们对技术的生产和分配及其对全球经济的影响的理解。第一个贡献是方法论。国际贸易文献在很大程度上忽略了外国市场进入决策的相互依赖性。相互依存意味着向一个外国市场出口的决定不会影响在国内市场或其他外国市场上赚取的利润。虽然这是一个简化的假设，以确保分析的可追溯性，但它可能以不准确地估计国际贸易的福利影响为代价。我建议一种新的随机方法来克服计算限制。这种方法暗示了许多问题，比如从出口、不完整的劳动力和信贷市场或全球采购中学习。第二个主要贡献是专题，并将建议的方法应用于一些问题。首先，知识是如何跨国界（也可能跨部门）传播的？这种传播对国际贸易流动、工资和福利发挥了什么作用？在评估这些影响时，相互依赖的市场进入的作用是什么？我通过个人创新决策和技术扩散扩展了标准贸易模型。结构估计使我们能够了解经济渠道及其大小。在第二个子项目中，我专注于跨国生产。除了出口之外，公司还可以选择其他的国外生产基地，从那里它们可能出口到某些目的地。近年来，这种模型得到了广泛应用，强调跨国生产与更准确地估计福利影响的相关性。然而，最近的研究忽略了企业特定的技术决策、知识扩散和相互依赖的市场进入。因此，我期待对国际贸易福利效应的估计有新的见解。第三个有趣的问题与不平等有关。在知识传播减少或没有的情况下，各国的相对GDP会是什么样子？这对国内不平等有什么影响？为了解决这方面的问题，我扩展了不完全劳动力市场模型，以使对企业技术决策和知识扩散作出反应的国别工资分配合理化。

Technology is one of the main determinants of economic growth and prosperity. To raise the standard of living, existing technology needs to be improved and new technology needs to be invented. The world is characterized by a few technological leaders that accommodate the bulk of global innovation. Lagging countries, however, benefit from this technological progress as knowledge spills across industry and country borders. These spillovers contribute to the distribution of economic activity and thus income around the world. This research project aims at improving our understanding of the production and distribution of technology and its consequences in the global economy in a number of ways.The first contribution is methodological. The international trade literature largely ignores the interdependence of foreign market entry decisions. Interdependence means that the decision to export to one foreign market does not affect profits earned on the domestic market or on other foreign markets. While this is a simplifying assumption to ensure analytical tractability, it may come at the expense of estimating the welfare effects of international trade inaccurately. I suggest a novel stochastic approach to overcome the computational limitations. This approach has implications for numerous questions like learning from exporting, incomplete labor and credit markets, or global sourcing.The second major contribution is topical and applies the suggested approach to a number of questions. First, how does knowledge diffuse across borders (and potentially across sectors) and what role does this diffusion play for international trade flows, wages, and welfare? What is the role of interdependent market entry for estimating these effects? I extend a standard trade model by individual innovation decisions and technology diffusion. Structural estimation allows us to learn about economic channels and their magnitudes.In a second sub-project, I focus on multinational production. In addition to exporting, firms can choose additional foreign production sites from which they may potentially export to certain destinations. Such models have been widely applied in recent years stressing the relevance of multinational production to estimate welfare effects more accurately. However, recent work has ignored firm-specific technology decisions, knowledge diffusion and interdependent market entry. I am thus expecting novel insights for the estimation of welfare effects of international trade.A third interesting set of questions relates to inequality. How would countries' relative GDP look like with less or no diffusion of knowledge? What are the implications for within-country inequality? To address this aspect, I extend the model with incomplete labor markets to rationalize country-specific wage distributions that respond to the technology decisions of firms and the diffusion of knowledge.