Marcus Biermann

We show that multinational firms transmit shocks across countries through their internal capital markets. We study a credit supply shock to parent firms in Germany. International affiliates outside Germany supported their parents through internal lending, became financially constrained themselves, and experienced lower real growth. We find that managers were "Darwinist" with respect to international affiliates but "Socialist" in the home country, that internal capital markets transmitted the credit shock more strongly than a non-financial shock, and that access to developed credit markets attenuated the real effects. The total real impact of shock transmission through multinationals on foreign economies was large.

This paper analyzes the consequences of the change in the presentation mode of economics seminars triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The composition of seminar speakers changed significantly. The share of seminars held by women increased. Several indicators of speaker productivity show that speakers at the top of the distribution also gained shares. The geography of knowledge dissemination shifted significantly as the distance between host and speaker institutions increased on average by 32 percent. The results imply that the opportunity to offer virtual presentations instead of traveling to deliver in-person presentations can decrease gender-specific inequality and increase inequality in favor of the "stars" within the profession.

Seminars are an important channel through which researchers receive feedback on their work and disseminate it. This paper presents descriptive evidence on the representation of female, male, and mixed teams in economics seminars. I use a balanced panel of 270 institutions in the academic years 2018–2020. I find that before COVID-19, only 7.4 percent of presented projects were authored by female teams, 59.2 percent of projects were authored by male teams, and 33.5 percent of projects were authored by mixed teams. The introduction of virtual seminars during the COVID-19 pandemic led to more balanced distribution across team types.

This paper investigates how management practices as intangible transfers are associated with the performance of multinational business groups. Differences in the management level across source countries are predictive for multinationals’ entry patterns for a given destination country. This study uses acquisitions as a means to transplant management practices from parents to affiliates abroad. It finds that better-managed parents decrease employment and increase productivity post-acquisition. The productivity gains are driven by targets with less developed management practices and by targets of larger parents. Better-managed parents are also more likely to install or retain a manager from the parent country post-acquisition.

What effect did trade have on the size distribution of firms during the first wave of globalization? Three historical datasets from the German Empire between 1875 and 1907 were collected and harmonized to answer this question. This paper combines industry census and bilateral railway trade data from the same industry and region along with industry-level tariff data. The evidence shows that increases in aggregate trade caused the share of firms to shift from smaller to larger firms. Exogenous decreases in tariffs caused an increase in the share of the largest firms. The regional distributive effects of trade on inequality between firms that are discussed in the contemporaneous literature were already present during the first wave globalization.