We examine the differential response of establishments to the recent global financial crisis with particular emphasis on the role of foreign ownership. Using a worldwide establishment panel dataset, we investigate how multinational subsidiaries around the world responded to the crisis relative...

The explosion of multinational activities in recent decades is rapidly transforming the global landscape of industrial production. But are the emerging clusters of multinational production the rule or the exception? What drives the offshore agglomeration of multinational firms in comparison to...

Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized explanation is between-firm selection and...

In this paper we use micro data on both trade and production for a sample of large Chinese manufacturing firms in the footwear industry from 2002-2006 to estimate an empirical model of export demand, pricing, and market participation by destination market. We use the model to construct indexes...

Government corruption is more prevalent in poor countries than in rich countries. This paper uses cross-industry heterogeneity in growth rates within Vietnam to test empirically whether growth leads to lower corruption. We find that it does. We begin by developing a model of government...

We study the welfare costs of markups in a dynamic model with heterogeneous firms and endogenously variable markups. We find that the welfare costs of markups are large. We decompose the costs of markups into three channels: (i) an aggregate markup that acts like a uniform output tax, (ii)...

We study a Chinese policy that awards substantial tax cuts to firms with R&D investment over a threshold or “notch.” Quasi-experimental variation and administrative tax data show a significant increase in reported R&D that is partly driven by firms relabeling expenses as R&D. Structural...

Market structure is determined by the entry and exit decisions of individual producers. These decisions are driven by expectations of future profits which, in turn, depend on the nature of competition within the market. In this paper we estimate a dynamic, structural model of entry and exit in...

We study the gains from trade in a model with endogenously variable markups. We show that the pro-competitive gains from trade are large if the economy is characterized by (i) extensive misallocation, i.e., large inefficiencies associated with markups, and (ii) a weak pattern of cross-country...

We incorporate the lumpy nature of firm-level investment into the study of how tax policy affects investment behavior. We show that tax policies can directly impact the lumpiness of investment. Extensive-margin responses to tax policy are key to understanding the effects of different tax reforms...