Christian Bartels Kastrup defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate:

Christian Bartels Kastrup, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Title:

Essays on Trade, Business-Cycle Comovement, and Firms’ Production Structure

Supervisors:

• Søren Hove Ravn, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
• Jakob Roland Munch, Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Assessment Committee:

• Morten G. Olsen, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
• Nitya Pandalai-Nayar, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Texas Austin
• Frederic Warzynski, Visiting Professor, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)

Summary:

This thesis contains three self-contained chapters with different research questions and methods, but all relate to international economics and business cycle macroeconomics. By improving our understanding of how foreign disturbances affect the Danish economy, the insights will hopefully help policy-makers and firms navigate environments where foreign disturbances are becoming more frequent.

The thesis sheds light on how firm heterogeneity, in interaction with labor market rigidities, influences the transmission of foreign shocks and the comovement of business cycles. The main contributions of the first two chapters are to illustrate that firm heterogeneity dampens the average impact of foreign shocks but paradoxically amplifies the link between trade and business cycle comovement.

The last chapter of this thesis shows the cruciality of taking non-linearities, such as fluctuations over the business cycle, of technical change into account when estimating how a firm’s production inputs are substituted.

An electronic copy of the dissertation can be requested here: lema@econ.ku.dk