This paper investigates the role of structural reforms -financial reforms, trade liberalization, and privatization- 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 investigates the determinants of FDI inflows to emerging market economies, concentrating on the effects of economic policies. The empirical analysis also addresses the role of external push factors and of political stability using a domestic conflict events database. The results...

Using manufacturing and services firm-level data for 30 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, this paper shows that taxation is not a significant driver for the location of foreign firms in SSA, while other investment climate factors, such as infrastructure, human capital, and insitutions, are....

This paper introduces a comprehensive database on bank ownership for 137 countries over 1995-2009, and reviews foreign bank behavior and impact. It documents substantial increases in foreign bank presence, with many more home and host countries. Current market shares of foreign banks average 20...

This paper considers two empirical questions about tax incentives: (1) are incentives used as tools of tax competition and (2) how effective are incentives in attracting investment? To answer these, we prepared a new dataset of tax incentives in over 40 Latin American, Caribbean and African...

Studying a large number of banks in various countries between 1999 and 2006, we document that foreign banks perform better when from a high income country, when host country competition is limited, and when they are large and rely more on deposits for funding. Foreign banks' performance improves...

This paper summarizes recent arguments/findings on two aspects of foreign direct investment (FDI): its correlation with economic growth and its determinants. The first part focuses on recent literature regarding positive spillovers from FDI while the second deals with the determinants of FDI....

This paper investigates the efficiency of domestic and foreign banks in the Central American region during 2002-07. Using two main empirical approaches, Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis, the paper finds that foreign banks are not necessarily more efficient than their...

We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to substantial productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI spillovers is...

In this paper, we adopt a cross-country perspective to examine the evolution of capital flows into China, both in terms of volumes and composition. China's inflows have generally been dominated by foreign direct investment (FDI), a pattern that appears to be favorable in light of the recent...