KCG Journal Articles

Bring the boys back home: The impact of foreign divestments on local firms

27th June 2025
KCG Secretary
Authors: Holger Görg, Haiou Mao, Nigel Driffield (The World Economy, forthcoming)

Divestments by foreign multinationals are an important phenomenon that is largely neglected in the literature. We use firm level panel data from China to estimate the impact of such divestments on the performance of domestic firms in the local economy. To the best of our knowledge, there is no empirical study that has looked at these effects[...]

How consumer animosity drives anti-consumption: A multi-country examination of social animosity

29th January 2025
KCG Secretary
Authors: Tinka Krüger, Stefan Hoffmann, Ipek N. Nibat, Robert Mai, Olivier Trendel, Holger Görg, Wassili Lasarov (Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2024, 81: 103990)

In times of uncertainty, the study of consumer animosity and how it affects anti-consumption behavior becomes more important for both academics and practitioners. This study focuses on the social nature of boycotts and contributes to the literature by analyzing the influence of normative components[...]

How Importers Hedge Demand Uncertainty Through Dual Sourcing and Safety Inventory

29th January 2025
KCG Secretary
Authors: Chris Muris, Horst Raff, Nicolas Schmitt and Frank Stähler (Canadian Journal of Economics, forthcoming)

We develop a dynamic model of inventory and trade to study how an importer may hedge demand uncertainty when importing involves an order lead time. We show that when the import cost is low, the importer optimally holds safety inventory, i.e., inventory of imported goods in excess of expected sales to deal with demand surges[...]

Digitalization Intensity and Extensive Margins of Exports in Manufacturing Firms from 27 EU Countries – Evidence from Kernel-Regularized Least Squares Regression

8th January 2025
KCG Secretary
Authors: Joachim Wagner (Economic Analysis Letters, 2024, 4(1): 22–29)

The use of digital technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, or smart devices can be expected to go hand in hand with higher productivity and lower trade costs, and, therefore, to be positively related to export activities[...]

Cloud computing and extensive margins of exports: Evidence for manufacturing firms from 27 EU countries

8th May 2024
KCG Secretary
Authors: Joachim Wagner (Journal of Information Economics 2024 2(1): 102–111)

The use of cloud computing by firms can be expected to go hand in hand with higher productivity, more innovations, and lower costs, and, therefore, should be positively related to export activities. Empirical evidence on the link between cloud computing and exports, however, is missing[...]

Africa’s Female Entrepreneurs – Underfunded or Underperforming?

23rd May 2023
KCG Secretary
Authors: Charles Ackah, Holger Görg, Aoife Hanley and Cecília Hornok (Small Business Economics, 2024, 62:1051–1074)

We explore the export performance of Africa’s underperforming female entrepreneurs, using the Ghanaian ISSER-IGC panel, a comprehensive dataset of manufacturing firms for 2011–2015. Uniquely, the data provides information about the severity of key business constraints, across both male and female entrepreneurs[...]

Who wins and who loses from state subsidies?

6th September 2022
KCG Secretary
Authors: Jun Du, Sourafel Girma, Holger Görg, Ignat Stepanok (Canadian Journal of Economics, 2023, 56(3): 1007-1031)

China is perceived to rely on subsidizing firms in targeted industries to improve their performance and stay competitive. We implement an approach that allows for the joint estimation of direct and indirect effects of subsidies on subsidized and non-subsidized firms. We find that firms that receive subsidies experience a boost for productivity[...]