The exceptional export performance of foreign-owned firms is a well-established stylized fact, but the underlying mechanism is not yet fully understood. In this paper, we provide theory and empirical evidence demonstrating that this fact can be explained by ownership differences in access to...

This study tests FDI technology spillover models with the assumption that learning takes time against wage bargaining models by estimating the wage-premium of a foreign takeover. The technology spillover theory predicts a larger wage growth in firms taken over by foreign investors than in local...

This study distinguishes multinational firm (MNE) technology-spillover from learning effects. Whenever learning takes time, the model predicts that foreign investors deduct the economic value of learning from wages of inexperienced workers and add it to experienced ones to prevent them from...

Does the emigration of skilled individuals necessarily result in losses for source countries due to the brain drain? Combining industry-level patenting and migration data from 32 European countries, we show that emigration in fact positively contributes to innovation in source countries. We use...

Firm-to-firm relationships in global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly excludable. The paper introduces a new taxonomy of...

Adding to the corruption-gender nexus, this paper contributes across several dimensions: (a) measurement of corruption by studying whether female managers and female owners of firms perceived corruption differently; (b) using survey information at the firm level; and (c) employing a large sample...

This paper explores empirically whether and how FDI is affected if multinationals’ home countries change taxation of foreign earnings by switching from worldwide to territorial taxation. Our analysis employs data for German inbound FDI based on the ultimate investing country concept. We use a...

We study how a preferential trade agreement (PTA) affects international sourcing decisions, aggregate productivity and welfare under incomplete contracting and endogenous matching. Contract incompleteness implies underinvestment. That inefficiency is mitigated by a PTA, because the agreement...

The use of tax havens by multinational corporations (MNCs) has attracted increasing attention and scrutiny in recent years. This paper provides an exposition of the academic literature on this topic. It begins with an overview of the basic facts regarding MNCs' use of havens, which are...

We add to the literature on the influence of the global financial cycle (GFC) and gyrations in capital flows. First, we build a new measure of the GFC based on a structural factor approach, which incorporates theoretical priors in its definition. This measure can also be decomposed in a...