We examine how multinational firms with heterogeneous total factor productivity (TFP) self-select into different host countries. Both aggregate- and firm-level estimates suggest that more productive French firms are more likely than their less efficient competitors to invest in relatively tough...

The traditional education system in Qing China has been widely debated over the past decades. Some have argued it was efficient and furthered economic growth, while others have stressed its inefficient nature, which led to the introduction of the modern education system in the closing decades of...

The majority of multinational firms today operate a multilateral production network. Most existing empirical analyses have, however, focused on firms' choice between producing at home and investing overseas and assumed that a firm's decision to invest in a foreign country is independent of its...

We use a Chinese firm-director level panel dataset to examine the matching of heterogeneous firms and politicians. Based on 36,308 detailed biographies, we identify individuals that previously held bureaucratic positions and classify the rank of each position in the Chinese political hierarchy....

The recent proliferation of free trade agreements (FTAs) has resulted in an increasingly complex network of preferential trading relationships. The economics literature has generally examined the formation of FTAs as a function of the participating countries' economic characteristics alone. In...

Most multinational firms today operate multilateral production networks. Most existing empirical analyses, however, have focused on firms' choice between producing at home and investing overseas. This paper uses detailed French multinational subsidiary data to examine the effect of existing...