Gianmarco Ottaviano

Last updated

Gianmarco Ireo Paolo Ottaviano (born in Milan on September 29, 1967) is an Italian economist and Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. [1]

Contents

Biography

A native of Milan, Gianmarco Ottaviano earned a bachelor's degree in Economic and Social Sciences from Bocconi University in 1991, followed by a M.Sc. in economics from the London School of Economics in 1993, a diploma in international economics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva in 1994, a doctorate from Bari in 1995 and a Ph.D. in economics under Jacques-François Thisse at the Université Catholique de Louvain in 1998. He then took up a position as assistant professor of economics at the University of Bologna, followed by an associate professorship at Bocconi in 2000, and a full professorship at Bologna in 2002. In 2008, Ottaviano returned to Bocconi before moving to the London School of Economics in 2013, where he directed the Trade Programme of the Centre for Economic Performance, and back to Bocconi in 2019.

He is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Center for Financial Studies, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, and the Leverhulme Centre for Research on Globalisation and Economic Policy. Moreover, he is a member of the scientific advisory boards of the Central Bank Research Association and the Centre d'Etudes Prospectives et d'Informations Internationales (CEPII), among others. In terms of professional service, he performs editorial duties at Economica , the Italian Economic Journal , Spatial Economic Analysis , Regional Science and Urban Economics , Politica Economica , and the Revue Région et Développement , and has been on editorial boards of Economic Policy , International Economics , Journal of the European Economic Association , Journal of Economic Geography , Journal of Regional Science , and the Journal of Urban Economics in the past. [2]

Research

Gianmarco Ottaviano's research areas include capital movements and multinational firms, development and growth, economic integration, international trade, international migration, and regional cohesion. [1]

Research on the economics of agglomeration

Reviewing the literature on economic geography, Ottaviano and Diego Puga reconcile the conclusions of Spence (1976) and Dixit and Stiglitz (1977): stronger competition in local product and factor markets causes spatial dispersion, though firms tend to locate close to large markets in order to take advantage of increasing returns to scale and keep trade costs low, which in turn creates pecuniary externalities fostering economic agglomeration. By affecting trade costs, economic integration then shapes the spatial location of economic activities and explains a range of patterns such as offshoring, local immigration and infra-regional development. [3] In that context, Ottaviano and Rikard Forslid developed an extension of Krugman's classical core-periphery model through the introduction of heterogeneity in workers' skills and mobility. [4] Moreover, Ottaviano, Takatoshi Tabuchi and Jacques-François Thisse have shown that the insights from new economic geography models à la Dixit and Stiglitz (1976) do not depend on the choice of modelling framework by developing a distinct modelling framework that yielded the same results. [5] Ottaviano and Thisse's perspective on the relationship between agglomeration and economic geography is elaborated in a chapter of the Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics. [6]

In another study on the link between agglomeration and growth with Philippe Martin, Ottaviano showed how both processes can be mutually self-reinforcing, as agglomeration reduces the cost of innovation and thereby raises growth, while growth further fosters agglomeration as new firms cluster close to the sector from which innovation originates. [7] They similarly showed how growth, FDI, and industrial concentration are mediated through transaction costs and R&D spillovers, with important implications for economic development. [8] In further work with Richard Baldwin, Ottaviano and Martin showed how the industrialization and growth take-off of rich northern countries, massive global income divergences and then convergence through trade integration can be explained through changes in trade costs. [9]

Research on the economics of international trade

Together with Marc Melitz, Ottaviano developed a trade model in which productivity and price mark-ups respond to size and integration of a market through international trade, with higher integration enabling tougher competition and thus also changing the composition of producers and exporters in that market. [10] Expanding this framework in further work with Thierry Mayer to firms' product mixes and range of exported products, Ottaviano and Melitz confirmed the claim that tougher competition in an export market induces firms to skew their export sales towards their best performing products, a finding that is confirmed for French exporters and bears important implications for firms' productivity. [11] In earlier work on the internationalisation of European firms, Ottaviano and Mayer observed that a few high-performing firms drive their countries' international performance, suggesting that economic integration policies should focus on raising the number of international firms rather than "deepening" the international involvement of already internationalized firms. [12]

Research on migration and diversity

In joint work with Giovanni Peri, Ottaviano investigated the relationship between linguistic diversity across U.S. cities and local productivity over 1970–90; together, they find that wages and employment density of U.S.-born workers were systematically higher, all else equal, in cities with higher linguistic diversity, especially for highly educated and for white workers, and that the relationship was strengthened the better non-native speakers were assimilated in terms of language skills and duration of residence. [13] Further research by Ottaviano and Peri on the value of cultural diversity - as proxied by the diversity of countries of birth of U.S. residents - suggested that US-born citizens living in metropolitan areas with increasing shares of foreign-born residents experienced significant growth in wages and housing values. [14] Their thinking about the effects of immigration on natives' wages turns around the notion that natives and foreigners are inherently imperfectly substitutable even within the same skill group. Using this framework, they showed that immigration to the U.S. in 1990-2006 had small negative short-run effects on native high school dropouts (-0.7%) and average wages (-0.4%), while raising the wages of native high school dropouts and average native wages in the long run by 0.3% and 0.6%, respectively, but depressing the long-run wages of previous immigrants by 6.7%. [15] [16] [17] Another study by Ottaviano with Peri and Greg Wright observed that manufacturing industries with a larger increase in exposure to globalization (through offshoring or immigration) saw improvements in terms of native employment growth relative to less exposed industries. They explain this finding through a model wherein natives, immigrants and offshore workers differ systematically in their ability to apply complex skills and wherein jobs vary in the degree to which their performance requires complex skills. In this framework, the productivity effect related to more efficient task assignment - producers hiring natives, immigrants and offshore workers for different tasks according to their respective comparative advantage - may offset the displacement effect of immigration and offshoring on natives' employment. [18] Finally, with regard to the labour market effects of immigration to Western Germany during the 1990s, Ottaviano - together with Peri and Francesco d'Amuri - found that immigration had a sizeable adverse effect on previous immigrants' employment and a small adverse effect on their wages, while having very little adverse effects on native wages and employments; the authors explain this divergence through the higher substitutability between different groups of immigrants relative to that between immigrants and natives. [19]

Related Research Articles

This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Economic geography</span> Subfield of human geography and economics

Economic geography is the subfield of human geography which studies economic activity and factors affecting them. It can also be considered a subfield or method in economics. There are four branches of economic geography. There is, primary sector, Secondary sector, Tertiary sector, & Quaternary sector.

One of the major subfields of urban economics, economies of agglomeration describes, in broad terms, how urban agglomeration occurs in locations where cost savings can naturally arise. Most often discussed in terms of economic firm productivity, agglomeration effects can also explain the phenomenon where large proportions of the population are clustered in cities and major urban centres. Similar to economies of scale, the costs and benefits of agglomerating increase the larger the agglomerated urban cluster becomes. A prominent example of where agglomeration has brought together firms of a specific industry is Silicon Valley in California, USA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alfred Weber</span> German geographer and economist (1868–1958)

Alfred Weber was a German economist, geographer, sociologist and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography.

A jobless recovery or jobless growth is an economic phenomenon in which a macroeconomy experiences growth while maintaining or decreasing its level of employment. The term was coined by the economist Nick Perna in the early 1990s.

Masahisa Fujita is a Japanese economist who has studied regional science and Urban economics and International Trade, Spatial Economy. He is a professor at Konan University and an adjunct professor at Institute of Economic Research, Kyoto University.

New trade theory (NTT) is a collection of economic models in international trade theory which focuses on the role of increasing returns to scale and network effects, which were originally developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The main motivation for the development of NTT was that, contrary to what traditional trade models would suggest, the majority of the world trade takes place between countries that are similar in terms of development, structure, and factor endowments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Immigration</span> Movement of people into another country or region to which they are not native

Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and other short-term stays in a destination country do not fall under the definition of immigration or migration; seasonal labour immigration is sometimes included, however.

In international economics, international factor movements are movements of labor, capital, and other factors of production between countries. International factor movements occur in three ways: immigration/emigration, capital transfers through international borrowing and lending, and foreign direct investment. International factor movements also raise political and social issues not present in trade in goods and services. Nations frequently restrict immigration, capital flows, and foreign direct investment.

The economic results of migration impact the economies of both the sending and receiving countries.

Spatial inequality refers to the unequal distribution of income and resources across geographical regions. Attributable to local differences in infrastructure, geographical features and economies of agglomeration, such inequality remains central to public policy discussions regarding economic inequality more broadly.

The economic impact of undocumented immigrants in the United States is challenging to measure, and politically contentious. Research shows that undocumented immigrants increase the size of the U.S. economy/contribute to economic growth, enhance the welfare of natives, contribute more in tax revenue than they collect, reduce American firms' incentives to offshore jobs and import foreign-produced goods, and benefit consumers by reducing the prices of goods and services. Economists estimate that legalization of the undocumented immigrant population would increase the immigrants' earnings and consumption considerably, and increase U.S. gross domestic product.

International trade theory is a sub-field of economics which analyzes the patterns of international trade, its origins, and its welfare implications. International trade policy has been highly controversial since the 18th century. International trade theory and economics itself have developed as means to evaluate the effects of trade policies.

Alan Manning is a British economist and professor of economics at the London School of Economics.

Joseph Gerard Altonji is an American labour economist and the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University. His fields of interest include macroeconomics and applied econometrics and in particular labour economics, being ranked as one of the foremost labour economists worldwide. In 2018, his contributions to the analysis of labour supply, family economics and discrimination were rewarded with the IZA Prize in Labor Economics.

Giovanni Peri is an Italian-born American economist who is Professor and Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis, where he directs the Global Migration Center. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the co-editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of the European Economic Association. He is known for his research on the economic impact of immigration to the United States. He has also researched the economic determinants of international migrations and the Economic impact of immigration in several European Countries. He has challenged and broadened the work of George Borjas, which has argued that immigration has negative economic effects on low educated US workers.

Christian Dustmann, FBA, is a German economist who currently serves as Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics of University College London. There, he also works as Director of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), which he helped found. Dustmann belongs to the world's foremost labour economists and migration scholars.

Thierry Mayer is a French economist and Professor of Economics at Sciences Po. He belongs to the most frequently-cited economists in the field of international trade. In 2006, Mayer and Etienne Wasmer were awarded the Best Young Economist of France Award by Cercle des économistes and Le Monde.

The decoupling of wages from productivity, sometimes known as the great decoupling, is the gap between the growth rate of median wages and the growth rate of GDP. Economists began to acknowledge this problem toward the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. This problem furthermore leads to wage stagnation despite continued economic growth.

Immigration to the United States has many effects on the culture and politics of the United States.

References

  1. 1 2 Profile of Gianmarco Ottaviano at Bocconi University. Retrieved July 3rd, 2019.
  2. CV of Gianmarco Ottaviano from the website of the London School of Economics. Retrieved July 3rd, 2019.
  3. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Puga, D. (1998). Agglomeration in the global economy: a survey of the 'new economic geography'. World Economy, 21(6), pp. 707-731.
  4. Forslid, R., Ottaviano, G.I.P. (2003). An analytically solvable core-periphery model. Journal of Economic Geography, 3(3), pp. 229-240.
  5. Ottaviano, G., Tabuchi, T., Thisse, J.-F. (2002). Agglomeration and trade revisited. International Economic Review, 43(2), pp. 409-435.
  6. Ottaviano, G., Thisse, J.F. (2004). Agglomeration and economic geography. In: Henderson, J.V., Thisse, J.-F. (eds). Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, vol. 4. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 2563-2608.
  7. Martin, P., Ottaviano, G.I.P. (2001). Growth and agglomeration. International Economic Review, 42(4), pp. 947-968.
  8. Martin, P., Ottaviano, G.I.P. (1999). Growing locations: Industry location in a model of endogenous growth. European Economic Review, 43(2), pp. 281-302.
  9. Baldwin, R.E., Martin, P., Ottaviano, G.I.P. (2001). Global income divergence, trade, and industrialization: The geography of growth take-offs. Journal of Economic Growth, 6(1), pp. 5-37.
  10. Melitz, M.J., Ottaviano, G.I.P. (2008). Market size, trade, and productivity. Review of Economic Studies, 75(1), pp. 295-316.
  11. Mayer, T., Melitz, M.J., Ottaviano, G.I.P. (2014). Market size, competition, and the product mix of exporters. American Economic Review, 104(2), pp. 495-536.
  12. Mayer, T., Ottaviano, G.I.P. (2008). The happy few: The internationalisation of European firms. Intereconomics, 43(3), pp. 135-148.
  13. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G. (2005). Cities and cultures. Journal of Urban Economics, 58(2), pp. 304-337.
  14. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G. (2006). The value of cultural diversity: evidence from US cities. Journal of Economic Geography, 6(1), pp. 9-44.
  15. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G. (2005). Rethinking the Gains from Immigration: Theory and Evidence from the US. NBER Working Paper Series, No. 11672.
  16. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G. (2008). Immigration and national wages: Clarifying the theory and the empirics. NBER Working Paper Series, No. 14188.
  17. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G. (2012). Rethinking the effect of immigration on wages. Journal of the European Economic Association, 10(1), pp. 152-197.
  18. Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G., Wright, G.C. (2013). Immigration, offshoring, and American jobs. American Economic Review, 103(5), pp. 1925-1959.
  19. D'Amuri, F., Ottaviano, G.I.P., Peri, G. (2010). The labor market impact of immigration in Western Germany in the 1990s. European Economic Review, 54(4), pp. 550-570.

Bibliography (selected)