Marc-Andreas Muendler

Trade and Offshoring

Offshoring and global value chains have reshaped global trade patterns. In a recent VOX column, Marc-Andreas Muendler and Sascha Becker describe how the German economy has been exposed to significant offshoring for at least three decades. The authors find an increasing importance of high-end tasks in the country. Organizing and consulting activities under deadlines, changing business conditions, and tougher performance standards are an increasingly common reality in German workplaces. Labor market institutions in German trade partners are largely unrelated to the changing content of German imports.

Mr. Muendler conducts research into local impacts of global markets. In the area of international trade, he investigates how globalization affects local industries and labor markets. For industrialized countries, Mr. Muendler studies the formation and operation of multinational enterprises and their impact on labor markets in Germany and Sweden. In the area of international finance, he analyses the reasons for investors to acquire information and how private information and public transparency affect financial markets.

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 UCSD in January 2003, having previously served one year as a lecturer at the LMU. Mr. Muendler has worked as a Consultant to the World Bank and private businesses, and as a Consulting Researcher for the Brazilian labor Ministry, the Brazilian census bureau, the German central bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He 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. Mr. Muendler was a Peter B. Kenen Research Fellow at Princeton University in 2008-09. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.