This paper investigates the role of structural reforms –privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization– as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

This Paper examines the importance of agglomeration economies and institutions vis-à-vis initial conditions and factor endowments in explaining the locational choice of foreign investors. Using a unique panel data set for 25 transition economies between 1990-98, we find that the main...

Although the theoretical literature has identified various sizeable benefits from foreign direct investment inflows (FDI), the empirical literature has been unable to establish a positive and significant impact of FDI on the rates of economic growth of host countries. One reason for this...

In most industrialized economies, financial wealth is distributed far more unequally than income. According to Wolff (2007) more than half of the American households possess almost no productive capital while realizing about 20 percent of national income. This mismatch poses a problem for the...

The aim of this paper is to construct theoretical models which help to shed light on the recent criticisms of volatile investment flows. We do not make any empirical attempt to establish the existence or gauge the importance of the adverse effects of volatile investment flows nor do we make any...

This paper investigates a hitherto unexplored rationale for firms to enter into joint ventures. We model risky projects with autocorrelated productivity shocks as creating an option value of investing over time so that later investments benefit from the information revealed by the realization of...

In this article we quantify the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of two revenue neutral flat-tax reforms using a model economy that replicates the U.S. distributions of earnings, income and wealth in very much detail. We find that the less progressive reform brings about a 2.4%...

We study the link between culturally inherited household structure and wealth distribution in international comparisons using household data for the US and Spain (the SCF and the EFF). We estimate counterfactual US distributions relying on the Spanish household structure. Our results show that...

This paper studies the relationship between investor protection, entrepreneurial risk taking and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, better protection makes investors more willing to take on entrepreneurial risk when lending to firms, thereby improving the degree of risk...

Previous empirical work on the link between domestic and foreign investment provides mixed results which partly depend on the level of aggregation of the data. We argue that the aggregated home country implications of foreign direct investment (FDI) cannot be gauged using firm-level data....