Kiel Trade Talks

The purpose of the seminar is to provide a platform for presenting and discussing ongoing research on globalization, above all international trade. It will take place monthly online or hybrid at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy or at the Bielefeld University. Both are the co-organizers of the Kiel Trade Talks.

If you would like to be regularly informed about upcoming Kiel Trade Talks, please subscribe to our mailing list here.
If you do not wish to receive any further e-mails from us, please click here.

Kiel Trade Talks #1 (Hybrid): 

Topic: Collaboration in Technology and Multinational Production

Sophia Praetorius, Ph.D. (University of Geneva)

Abstract: How does assembly technology and its sharing affect global production choices? To answer this question, I incorporate production technology choices into a structural multinational production model and allow for collaboration in specialized assembly assets across firms when choosing the optimal production locations for their varieties. I find that both the technology choice itself and the potential sharing of it have important effects on the expected cost and profits of firms, shaping the global allocation of production. Accounting for explicit production technology raises the median firm’s cost of serving a market by 24.84% compared to traditional models that do not incorporate such production technologies explicitly. On the other hand, I find that firms can ease these production constraints through licensing, granting them larger flexibility of production, reducing their cost by 12.21%. Importantly, the model allows, in addition to analyzing trade policy shocks, to investigate industrial policies that explicitly target the access to production technologies. While a unilateral export or import ban of specific technologies can have similar reallocative impacts as comparable tariff increases, the distributional consequences are different and largely borne by individual firms.

Date: March 6, 2026, 12:00 – 13:00

Venue: Kiel Institute (Medienraum) and virtually via MS Teams

If interested, please send an Email to kcg-office@ifw-kiel.de to receive a Link to the seminar.