Exploring the Boundaries of Public Finance, International Trade and System Competition: The New Heterogeneous Firm Based Approach

In recent years research on international trade and investment has been dominated by the heterogeneous firms approach, which takes into account differences across firms and explores its consequences for a number of new research questions as well as the long-standing normative and positive concerns of trade theory. What is also of particular interest is that such supply side heterogeneity and cross-country heterogeneity in institutions (such as the intensity of law enforcement) is being taken seriously in studies of international public finance and systems competition, so providing a common analytical thread through a number of fields of economic research with an international orientation. The second section of this document describes the research interests of each of the three faculty members involved in this application, as will become clear those interests cover the theoretical, empirical, and policy oriented aspects of heterogeneous firm theory. This research module seeks to capitalise on the research interests of three faculty members at the University of St. Gallen in these matters and to propose that three doctoral students can work closely with these faculty on a research programme of mutual interest. Suitably qualified doctoral students would be admitted to the University of St. Gallen's Programme on Economic and Finance (PEF). Through a combination of high-quality teaching and supervision of dissertation research, the objective of this research module is to encourage doctoral students to produce academic research papers of sufficient quality to be published in internationally-recognised peer-reviewed academic journals. Production of such publications would go a long way to successfully launch the careers of the doctoral students concerned, as well as foster and strengthen the research community at the University of St. Gallen. Even though the doctoral students would be expected to produce research within the general rubric of this Research Module, as is standard in the academic economics profession, the ac-tual content of their research will not be known until each doctoral student embarks on the dissertation phase. Moreover, in order to attract the largest pool of highly qualified applica-tions for this PRODOC it does not make sense to insist on applicants having very narrowly defined research interests.