Marc-Andreas Muendler

Labour Market Impact of Multinationals

In the area of international trade Marc-Andreas Muendler investigates how falling trade barriers affect local industries and labour markets. For industrialised countries, he analyses the formation and operation of multinational enterprises and their impact on labour markets, for example in Germany and Sweden. He discerns between the formation stage of the multinational enterprise, when it builds up its network of foreign affiliates, and the operation stage when the enterprise runs established affiliates; this approach documents that each stage is responsible for roughly half of a substantial shift of jobs, especially to low-income locations, in response to labour-cost gaps between regions. However, compared to domestic firms with no foreign affiliates, multinational enterprises retain more domestic workers under given global competition. This indicates that to prevent enterprises from expanding their foreign presence could mean even more domestic job losses to national and international competition. Moreover, as labour-cost gaps close between economically integrated countries, multinational enterprises are predicted to reshore activities. Mr Muendler's recent work on the changing nature of workplaces and tasks in Germany documents that larger plants partition the work flow into more occupations, and raise their efficiency by assigning workers to more specialized tasks, with consequences for higher inequality in pay at more globalised plants.

In the area of information economics Mr Muendler analyses the reasons for investors to acquire information and how private information and public transparency affect financial markets. A frequently proposed remedy to financial crises is transparency. His research shows under which conditions financial transparency is beneficial. There is, in fact, a natural transparency limit at which rational investors would pay to inhibit information disclosure because the asset-price surge, associated with more transparency, erodes subsequent expected returns.

Marc-Andreas Muendler is Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, a Research Professor at the ifo Institute, a CESifo Research Fellow and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined the University of California, San Diego in January 2003, having previously taught one year as a lecturer at the LMU. Mr Muendler has published in leading economic journals including the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Economic Theory and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He has worked as a consultant to the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and private businesses, and as a consulting researcher for the Brazilian labour ministry, the Brazilian census bureau, the German central bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.