This paper investigates whether the higher prevalence of South multinational enterprises (MNEs) in risky developing countries may be explained by the experience that they have acquired of poor institutional quality at home. We confirm the intuitions provided by our analytical model by...

We examine a trade model where three countries compete for an exogenous number of firms. In our hub-and-spoke framework, one country is the hub through which all trade with and between spokes takes place. We establish the distribution of industrial activity in the absence of taxes and compare it...

The macroeconomic literature on automatic stabilization tends to focus on taxes and dismiss the relevance of government expenditure, aside from unemployment compensation. Our results go sharply contrary to this view. We engage in an empirical analysis of 20 OECD countries from 1980-2001 and find...

Conventional wisdom has it that increasing price or exchange rate uncertainty will depress investment. Using the Dixit-Pindyck model, we find that there are situations where this does happen; and situations where it does not – i.e. increasing uncertainty leads to more investment. It depends...

Official calculations of automatic stabilizers are seriously flawed since they rest on the assumption that the only element of social spending that reacts automatically to the cycle is unemployment compensation. This puts into question many estimates of discretionary fiscal policy. In response,...

Globalisation is one of the primary accused culprits of growing income inequality in the developed world. In particular, outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) is often associated with general "skill upgrading" in the home country, that is, a shift in relative labour demand from low skilled...

Anti-dumping policies are often justified as legitimate actions by governments in their efforts to protect domestic producers from unfair foreign competition. We investigate the impact of anti-dumping rules on firms' production decisions as to how much and where to produce. Anti-dumping measures...

Although many countries welcome inward investments by multinational firms (MNEs), it is often perceived that MNEs readily close down production in bad times. We study the choice of an MNE in deciding whether to establish a branch plant within a region, explicitly taking into account exit, as...

The current debate on the likely impact of completion of the market in the European Community focuses crucially on the nature of the market structure. It has been suggested that 1992 will move an industry from a segmented-markets equilibrium to one in which the national markets are fully...

Oligopoly is empirically prevalent in the industries where MNEs operate and national governments compete with fiscal inducements for their FDI projects. Despite this, existing formal treatments of fiscal competition generally focus on the polar cases of perfect competition and monopoly. We...