In 2005 China provided duty-free access to 190 items from 25 least developed sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Three years later duty-free access was extended to 454 items from 31 SSA LDCs. We find no evidence that China's preferential market access program for the least developed sub-Saharan...

This paper contributes to the literature on international firm activities and firm performance by providing the first evidence on the link of productivity and both exports and foreign direct investment (fdi) in services firms from a highly developed country. It uses unique new data from Germany...

We study the effects of policy reforms in the South on the decisions of intrafirm and arm's length production transfers by Northern firms. We show theoretically that relaxing ownership controls and improving contract enforcement can induce multinational companies to expand product varieties to...

This paper summarizes in a non-technical way what we know from empirical studies based on firm-level data about the mutual links between international activities of firms and productivity. It is written with a view to inform policy makers in an evidence-based way. A special focus is on the...

We study how the 2004 reform of minimum wage rules in China has affected the survival, average wage, employment and productivity of local firms. To identify the causal effect of minimum wage growth, we use firm-level data for more than 160,000 manufacturing firms active in 2003 and complement...

This paper presents theory and evidence showing that institutional reforms in developing countries can effectively expand their product varieties in export. Our model demonstrates that relaxing foreign ownership controls and improving contract enforcement can induce multinational companies to...