KCG Working Papers

KCG Working Paper No. 36: Use of Advanced Technologies and Extensive Margins of Exports in Manufacturing Firms from 27 EU Countries in 2025

6th January 2026
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Authors: Joachim Wagner

The use of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, or smart devices will go hand in hand with higher productivity, higher product quality, and lower trade costs. Therefore, it can be expected to be positively related to export activities. This paper uses firm level data for manufacturing enterprises from the 27 member countries of the European Union collected in 2025 to shed further light on this issue by investigating the link between the use of advanced technologies and extensive margins of exports[...]

KCG Working Paper No. 35: Urbanized and Savvy – Which African Firms are Making the Most of Mobile Money?

19th September 2024
KCG Secretary
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Authors: Charles Ackah, Aoife Hanley, Lars Hecker, and Michael Kodom

Our analysis of over 500 Ghanaian firms sheds light, for the first time, on how certain firms managed to extract value from mobile money. Our regressions point to the usefulness of this form of cashless payments in stabilizing sales during the COVID pandemic[...]

KCG Working Paper No. 32: Estimation of empirical models for margins of exports with unknown non-linear functional forms: A Kernel-Regularized Least Squares (KRLS) approach

29th January 2024
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Author: Joachim Wagner

Empirical models for intensive or extensive margins of trade that relate measures of exports to firm characteristics are usually estimated by variants of (generalized) linear models. Usually, the firm characteristics that explain these export margins enter the empirical model in linear form, some-times augmented by quadratic terms or higher order polynomials, or interaction terms, to take care or test for non-linear relationships.

KCG Working Paper No. 31: Does Immigration Affect Native Wages? A Meta-Analysis

22nd January 2024
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Authors: Clément Nedoncelle, Léa Marchal, Amandine Aubry, and Jérôme Héricourt

The impact of immigration on native workers’ wages has been a topic of long-standing debate. This meta-analysis reviews 42 studies published between 1987 to 2019, offering a comprehensive as-sessment of reduced-form estimates of the wage effect of immigration[...]

KCG Working Paper No. 30: Technological Sophistication Made in China? – New Insights from Germany’s Evaluation of COVID-19 Antigen Rapid Tests

13th November 2023
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Authors: Silas Dreier and Wan-Hsin Liu

By analyzing a unique dataset from Germany’s evaluation of COVID-19 antigen rapid tests, we show that Chinese firms can excel under today’s global competition and produce tests at quality levels higher than China’s income level would suggest[...]

KCG Working Paper No. 29: Exports and firm survival in times of COVID-19 – Evidence from eight European countries

9th November 2023
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Author: Joachim Wagner

This paper uses firm level data from the World Bank Enterprise surveys conducted in 2019 and from the COVID-19 follow-up surveys conducted in 2020 in eight European countries to investigate the link between exporting before the pandemic and firm survival until 2020[...]

KCG Working Paper No. 28: Big Data Analytics and Exports – Evidence for Manufacturing Firms from 27 EU Countries

22nd September 2023
KCG Secretary
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Author: Joachim Wagner

The use of big data analytics (including data mining and predictive analytics) by firms can be expected to increase productivity and reduce trade costs, which should be positively related to export activities. This paper uses firm level data from the Flash Eurobarometer 486 survey conducted in February – May 2020 to investigate the link between the use of big data analytics and export activities in manufacturing enterprises from the 27 member countries of the European Union[...]