User:Arbraxan/Holger Görg

Holger Görg (born 1970) is a German economist who currently works as Professor of International Economics at the University of Kiel. Moreover, Görg also leads the Kiel Center for Globalization and heads the Research Area "Global Division of Labour" at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. In 2009, he was awarded the Gossen Prize for his contributions to the study of firms' decisions to invest, export and outsource parts of their value chains abroad.

Biography
Holger Görg earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in economics from Trinity College Dublin in 1996 and 1999, partly while working as a lecturer at the University College Cork. After his graduation, Görg worked as a lecturer at the University of Ulster (1999-2000) before becoming a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham's Leverhulme Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy (2000-03). Thereafter, he worked as a lecturer (assistant professor) (2003-05) and then as a reader (associate professor) in international economics in Nottingham (2005-08). Since 2008, Görg has worked in Germany, where he holds the position of Professor of International Economics at the University of Kiel and heads the research area "Global Division of Labour" at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW). Moreover, he has been the Director of the Kiel Centre for Globalization, an interdisciplinary research centre focused on the analysis of global supply chains, since 2016. Additionally, Görg maintains affiliations with the Tuborg Research Centre for Globalisation and Firms at Aarhus University, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

Research
Holger Görg's main expertise lays in the analysis of the effects of globalization. His current research focuses on the activities of multinational firms, in particular their international outsourcing and exporting, as well as the application of panel data econometrics at the micro level. In his research, Görg has frequently collaborated with Eric Strobl (University of Birmingham). According to IDEAS/RePEc, Görg belongs to the top 2% of economists as ranked by research output.

Research on multinational firms
One major area of Görg's research regards the behaviour of multinational firms. Therein, he has in particular researched - often with Strobl - productivity spillovers from multinational to domestic firms in the host country through worker flows, technological diffusion ("demonstration effects"), and technological competition. Moreover, Görg and Strobl find that multinational companies in the Irish manufacturing sector increase the entry of indigenous firms through linkages with indigenous suppliers. They also find those multinationals to increase plant survival, though only among indigenous plants in high-tech industries (probably through technology spillovers), whereas multinationals compete with each other in the host country's low-tech sectors. Furthermore, Görg and Strobl observe that multinationals are more likely to exit the market than indigenous plants, though new jobs generated in multinationals appear to be more persistent than those from indigenous plants; both types of firms are equally likely to reverse employment reductions.
 * Regional policy has attracted low-tech firms to disadvantaged areas when it used a more indirect approach, though policy incentives were a less important determinant of multinationals' location choice than agglomeration economies.
 * Firms which are run by owners who worked for multinationals in the same industry immediately prior to opening up their own firm are more productive than other domestic firms.
 * Acquisition by a foreign firm depends on the nationality of the foreign acquirer and the skill group of workers, with e.g. substantial pos-acquisition wage effects on skilled and unskilled wages if a firm has been acquired by a multinational from the U.S., no such effects if it is from the EU, and a positive wage effect for unskilled workers if acquired by multinationals from the rest of the world.
 * Görg and Strobl find that the impact of R&D subsidies on private R&D spending in Irish manufacturing depends on grant size and firms' ownership: for domestic plants, small public R&D grants increase private R&D spending and large grants crowd it out, whereas grants of any size don't affect foreign establishments' R&D spending.
 * The wage premium associated with working for a foreign owned firm is only acquired by workers over time spent in the firm and only by those that receive on-the-job training, thus suggesting that workers in foreign-owned firms are likely paid more because their training is more productive and firm-specific (with Strobl and Frank Walsh).

Research on foreign direct investment

 * A firm entering a foreign market via FDI generally best acquires an existing indigenous high-technology firm in order to form a duopoly with an indigenous lowtechnology firm instead of setting up an entirely new plant (greenfield investment).
 * Both "efficiency agglomerations", i.e. increases in firms' efficiency due to less distance between them, and "demonstration effects", i.e. firms' signals to new investors that the host country is reliable and attractive, were important determinants of U.S. firm entry into Ireland.
 * Empirical evidence on a positive impact of foreign direct investment through productivity, wage and export spillovers is at best mixed.
 * While FDI may have initially deterred the entry of local firms by signalling an increase in competition, this initial effect has been exceeded by positive externalities fostering the development of local firms, resulting in an overall strongly positive impact of FDI on the local economy.
 * The benefits of productivity spillovers from FDI in the UK depends on establishments' absorptive capacity.
 * In developing countries, inward FDI degressively increases wage inequality, whereas inward FDI in developed countries decreases wage inequality.

Research on firm exports

 * In the 1990s, own R&D activity made Spanish firms more likely to export, while R&D spillovers increase firms' export ratios, especially if they are exporting to other OECD countries; by contrast, there is little evidence for export spillovers.
 * Multinational plants perform better than domestic exporters and non-exporters, which perform roughly about the same.
 * The effects from productivity spillovers from FDI on domestic firms are very complex and differ substantially depending on whether the domestic firm operates in the export market as well as on the type of inward FDI.
 * Previous exporting experience enhances the innovative capability of Irish firms, whereas British firms don't display strong learning-by-exporting effects, with differences being partly attributable to Irish firms' greater interface with OECD markets.
 * If export grants are large enough, they can encourage already exporting firms to compete more effectively on the international market, though grants don't appear to encourage nonexporters to start exporting.

Research on international outsourcing
A fourth area of Görg's research concerns outsourcing, which he has intensively studied in Ireland and the UK. Together with Aoife Hanley, he finds that the international outsourcing of the production of intermediate materials increases the productivity of plants in the Irish electronics sector only if these have low export intensities, but that the oursourcing of services inputs only increases the productivity of domestic or foreign owned plants which export. The impact of outsourcing on profitability appears to depend not only on the type of outsourced input but also on plant size, with e.g. large plants benefitting from outsourcing materials whereas small plants don't. With regard to labour demand, outsourcing appears to decrease plant-level labour demand in the short run, especially for the outsourcing of materials. In British manufacturing, Görg and Sourafel Girma find that outsourcing might be motivated by cost savings as wages increase as outsourcing increases, that foreign-owned firms have higher levels of outsourcing, and that establishments' labour productivity and total factor productivity growth increases in establishments' outsourcing intensity, especially among foreign-owned ones. Moreover, together with Alexander Hijzen and Robert Hine, Görg finds that international outsourcing strongly decreased the demand for unskilled labour in the UK while R&D increased the demand for skilled labour. Similarly, in Germany, Görg and Ingo Geishecker observe that a 1 percentage point increase in an industry's outsourcing reduced the wages of low-skilled workers within that industry by up to 1.5% whereas it increased those of high-skilled workers by up to 2.6%.