There is abundant evidence that immigrants’ networks are associated with larger trade flows between countries of origin and the country (or province) where they settle. The causality of such relation and its magnitude, however, have not been proven beyond reasonable doubt. We use the simple...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the effect of ICT investment on the propensity to offshore for a large sample of Italian manufacturing firms. Contrary to previous literature focussing on the service sector, after taking into account the endogeneity of ICT investment in the...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (e.g., the IMF) and a country has for optimal (conditional) reform design. The main result is that the informational advantage of the country must be strictly greater than the advantage of the multilateral in order...

Firms in competitive markets are more likely achieve higher productivity. Indeed a better performance of multinationals and exporters with respect to domestic firms has been documented in the literature. The sources of these premia have however largely remained a black box: standard theoretical...

The paper contributes to the ongoing debate about the adequate technique to identify the impact of immigration. Initially the regression analysis on the basis of education-experience cells reveals that the impact of immigration on native wages in Germany is negative, but small. The subsequent...

We study, both theoretically and empirically, how export intensity (the ratio of exports to sales) is related to firm productivity. Using a representative sample of Italian manufacturing firms, we find that Total Factor Productivity (TFP) is strongly negatively correlated with export intensity...

This paper examines the role of male-dominated international migration in shaping labor market outcomes by gender in migrant-sending households in Albania. Using detailed information on family migration experience from the latest Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) survey, we find that...

Firms that invest abroad are large and more productive than their domestic counterparts. But to what extent are the international activities of firms also driven by differences across firms in terms of their access to external finance and the labor market conditions that there are facing? In...

There is continuing debate in east and southern Africa about the effects of food market reform on the welfare of small-scale farmers and low-income consumers. At the center of this debate is the perception that food prices have become more unstable in countries that have liberalized their staple...

Campaigns to prevent the spread of HIV require accurate knowledge of the characteristics of those most likely to contract the disease. Studies conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1980s generally found a positive correlation between socioeconomic characteristics such as education, income,...