Firms often cite financing constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Global capital flows, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease host-country firms' financing constraints. However, if incoming foreign investors borrow heavily from domestic basnks, direct foreign investment...

This paper explores the relationship between wages and foreign investment in Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States. Despite very different economic conditions and levels of development, we find one fact which is robust across all three countries: higher levels of foreign investment are...

This paper uses millions of records from a cross-country and time series database of both publicly listed and private companies to disentangle the role of technological change, market power, and globalization in driving a fall in the labor share. Labor shares are measured at the enterprise level...

In Mexico during the 1980s, the wages of more-educated, more- experienced workers rose relative to those of less-educated, less- experienced workers. We assess the extent to which the increase in the skilled-unskilled wage gap was associated with Mexico's recent trade reform. In particular, we...

This paper focuses on three unresolved issues with regard to the impact of trade reform. First, many studies linking trade reform to long run growth are surprisingly fragile. To illustrate the problems with this literature, we examine a popular measure of openness recently introduced by Sachs...

This paper draws together a variety of openness measures to test the association between openness and growth. Although the correlation across different types of openness is not always strong, there is generally a positive association between growth and different measures of openness. The...

Case studies of export behavior suggest that firms who penetrate foreign markets reduce entry costs for other potential exporters, either through learning by doing or through establishing buyer- supplier linkages. We pursue the idea that spillovers associated with one firm's export activity...