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

相互依赖的外国市场进入下的创新、技术扩散和收入不平等

• 批准号: 326113710
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Tobias Seidel
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Volkswirtschaftslehre
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2015-12-31 至 2019-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/326113710?language=en
• 关键词: Innovation; technology; diffusion; income; inequality

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.

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，需要改进现有技术，需要发明新技术。世界的特点是少数几个技术领导者容纳了大部分全球创新。然而，落后的国家从这种技术进步中受益，因为知识跨越了行业和国家边界。这些溢出效应促进了经济活动的分配，从而促进了全世界的收入分配。本研究项目旨在以多种方式提高我们对技术的生产和分配及其在全球经济中的后果的理解。国际贸易文献在很大程度上忽视了外国市场进入决定的相互依赖性。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，以确保分析的易处理性，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的局限性。这种方法对许多问题都有影响，比如从出口中学习，不完全的劳动力和信贷市场，或全球采购。第二个主要贡献是专题性的，并将建议的方法应用于一些问题。首先，知识如何跨越国界（以及潜在的跨部门）传播，这种传播对国际贸易流动、工资和福利发挥了什么作用？相互依存的市场进入对估计这些影响有什么作用？本文将一个标准的贸易模型扩展到个人创新决策和技术扩散。结构估计使我们能够了解经济渠道及其规模。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外国生产地点，从这些地点向某些目的地出口。近年来，这种模式得到广泛应用，强调多国生产的相关性，以更准确地估计福利影响。然而，最近的工作忽略了企业的具体技术决策，知识扩散和相互依存的市场进入。因此，我期待着对国际贸易福利影响的估计有新的见解。第三组有趣的问题与不平等有关。在知识传播较少或没有知识传播的情况下，国家的相对GDP会是什么样子？对国内不平等有何影响？为了解决这个问题，我扩展了模型与不完全的劳动力市场，合理化国家特定的工资分配，响应企业的技术决策和知识的扩散。