Marc-Andreas Muendler
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Marc-Andreas Muendler
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Marc-Andreas Muendler is a Professor in the Economics Department at the University of California, San Diego, a Research Professor at ifo Institute in Munich, a Guest Professor at the University of St. Gallen, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has published in leading economic journals on the origins of globalization and its consequences for local industries and labor markets, firm dynamics and entrepreneurship, and information economics. He has worked as a consultant to the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and private businesses, and as a consulting researcher for the Brazilian census bureau and labor ministry, the German central bank and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. Marc Muendler founded and directs the Globalization and Prosperity lab (GP-lab) at UC San Diego. Muendler's current research revolves around local impacts of global markets.
In the area of international trade Marc Muendler investigates how falling trade barriers affect local industries and labor markets. Much of Muendler's research uses novel linked data that identify firms and their individual workers over time. For Brazil, he analyzes the consequences of its large-scale trade liberalization in the early 1990s and economic performance, especially of labor markets, over the past two-and-a-half decades. With trade opening, Brazilian firms strongly improved efficiency and contributed to industrial competitiveness, but worker displacements resulted in idle labor outside formal employment. Globalized firms pay higher wages, and some firms globalize earlier than others. As a consequence, economy-wide wage inequality can initially increase but will then fall with the trade participation of more and more firms. Brazil's economy benefited from falling between-firm inequality soon after its trade liberalization. For industrialized countries, Muendler's work on the changing nature of workplaces and tasks in Germany documents that larger plants partition the work flow into more occupations and raise their efficiency by assigning workers to more specialized tasks, with consequences for higher inequality in pay at more globalized plants. Muendler also analyzes the formation and operation of multinational enterprises and their impact on labor markets. Muendler's research discerns between the formation stage of the multinational enterprise, when it builds up its network of foreign affiliates, and the operation stage when the enterprise runs established affiliates; this approach documents that each stage is responsible for roughly half of a substantial shift of jobs, especially to low-income locations, in response to labor-cost gaps between regions, but also implies reshoring of jobs to high-income countries as wage gaps between countries shrink. Compared to domestic firms with no foreign affiliates, multinational enterprises retain more domestic workers; this indicates that to prevent enterprises from expanding their foreign presence could mean even more domestic job losses to global competition. Muendler analyzes the dynamics of globalization on a worldwide scale using global data that track industries by country over five decades. A key finding is that a country's export capabilities are concentrated in only a few products at any moment, but leading industries can lose their comparative advantage in short time while a country's other industries build up their relative capabilities rapidly. The chance that a product currently among a country's top-five exports was already among its top-five products twenty years earlier is only two-in-five. This research agenda pinpoints export success stories, their duration, and their origins. In his research on firm dynamics and entrepreneurship Muendler studies how firms and industries successfully engage in globalization. (more detail) In the area of information economics Muendler analyzes the reasons for investors to acquire information and how private information and public transparency affect financial markets. (more detail) Muendler joined the University of California, San Diego in January 2003. Muendler taught as a lecturer at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2002 and was a visiting professor at Princeton University in 2008-09, a visiting professor at Université Dauphine, Paris in 2014-15, a visiting professor at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo in 2015, and a guest professor that the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 2018-19. Beyond his research, Muendler has an interest in international coffee trade. He lives in San Diego, California with his wife and two sons. |
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Last modified: January 4, 2024. © February 1999 and January 2003. All rights reserved. |
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