Stefan Legge

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects investment in R&D at the firm level. We provide a model with entrepreneurs that differ in their wealth endowments, causing them to rely on external funds to different extents. In the presence of capital market imperfections, this implies heterogeneous access to external financing such that poor entrepreneurs run smaller firms, are less likely to invest in R&D and are more likely to exit the market. Decreasing trade costs resulting from tariff reductions exacerbate these characteristics. Using firm-level panel data on seven Latin American countries for 2006 and 2010, we find support for our theoretical predictions. While prior research emphasizes a positive impact of trade liberalization on firms’ productivity-enhancing activities, we provide novel evidence showing that financial constraints can impair the effect on R&D efforts. These results suggest that imperfect capital markets can prevent welfare gains from trade liberalization to materialize.

Does information processing affect individual risk-taking behaviour? This article provides evidence that professional athletes suffer from a left-digit bias when dealing with signals about differences in performance. Using data from the highly competitive field of World Cup alpine skiing for the period of 1992–2014, we show that athletes misinterpret actual differences in race times by focusing on the leftmost digit, which results in increased risk-taking behaviour. For the estimation of causal effects, we exploit the fact that tiny time differences can be attributed to random shocks. We find no evidence that high-stakes situations or individual experience reduce the left-digit bias.

This paper investigates whether biased media attention affects perceptions about future events. We use data on World Cup tournaments in alpine skiing for the period of 1992–2014 and exploit close races as a source of randomness for ranking positions. Since the allocation of media attention is skewed towards the winner and athletes on the podium, we can estimate the causal effect of media attention. Our results document that ranking schemes generate sharp discontinuities in media attention even in close competitions. However, both regression discontinuity and instrumental variables estimates reveal that biased media attention neither affects prices nor quantities in the betting market. We conduct a series of robustness tests to explore the sensitivity of our results.

We investigate the impact of genetic distance on international trade flows. Using a new data set covering the universe of global trade, we show that genetic differences are an important barrier to international trade in addition to transportation costs. Country pairs with a high genetic distance are less likely to trade with each other (extensive margin) and if they do trade, we find that genetic distance negatively affects the volume and number of goods traded (intensive margin). Our findings are robust to including a vast array of micro-geographic controls as well as linguistic and religious distance variables. The inverse relationship between trade flows and genetic distance constitutes an important channel through which genetic distance affects income differences across countries.