This paper investigates which firms suffer from informal competition and highlights the role of access to finance in this context. We use cross-sectional data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys covering 42,000 firms in 114 developing and transition countries for the period 2006 to 2011 and...

I use the STAN database of the OECD and different econometric methods to investigate the effects of exports towards the EU-15 on wages in the Visegrad countries (CEEC-4; Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). The results do not allow to draw any definite statements about this effect....

This paper explores the economic relationship between foreign direct investment to developing countries and the export prices of the latter, measured by terms of trade. It is first shown that economic theory suggests such a relationship for various reasons but is inconclusive about the direction...

This paper first shows that important economic arguments in favor of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of falling terms of trade of developing countries have implicitly relied on the role of multinational corporations and foreign direct investment. As of yet, the relationship between the latter and...

This paper documents that cross-border investment income flows are important for explaining current account balances in major economies. Those investment incomes reflect returns on cross-border asset holdings and on balance often reach magnitudes around 5% of major economies' gross domestic...

This paper investigates the effects of multinational corporations on labor standards. We argue that the previous literature has failed to distinguish the different motives that encourage firms to become multinational. Therefore, we build a stylized model of segmented labor markets with...

This paper examines the impact of industrial robots on jobs. We combine data on robot adoption and occupations by industry in 37 economies for the period 2005–2015. We exploit differences across industries in technical feasibility—defined as the industry’s share of tasks replaceable by...

Many low-income countries, such as Haiti, have high ambitions and socioeconomic needs to achieve substantial income growth, especially for the poorest income quintiles. This situation raises the question of policy prioritization, which is often difficult to address, since reliable...