The Unassuming Economist

From a dissertation paper by Sebastian Stephan Leue:

“The three economic drivers of globalization are the free flow of labor, goods, and capital. Together they have shaped three waves of globalization over the last 200 years. This dissertation encompasses all three waves of globalization between 1877 and 2020, and it investigates its three main economic drivers: International migration, trade, and investment. Every chapter brings forward new insights to each of the three drivers separately. Chapters 1 and 2 provide novel and causal solutions to open questions to our fundamental understanding of migration and international trade, by exploiting two natural experiments over the long run. Chapter 1 contributes to the fundamental understanding of the causal effect of income on migration in the context of economic development. Chapter 2 revisits the distance puzzle in international trade. Chapter 3 examines the role of politics in Chinese exports of critical medical goods during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, Chapter 4 evaluates the economic impact of the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This dissertation further aims to provide new perspectives to all three economic drivers through causal empirical research. It introduces four spatially and temporally granular datasets that provide the foundation of novel insights to the globalization nexus through quasi-experimental methods.”