Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

Casual observation suggests that cultural differences play an important role in business transactions, yet systematic evidence on this relationship is scarce. This paper provides a novel investigation of the effect of cultural distance on multinational firms' decisions to integrate their...

Do contractual institutions and a country's level of trust interact in their impact on the international make-or-buy decision? By analyzing explicit and implicit contracting in a unified framework, I show that better formal contractibility may both facilitate and hinder relational contracting on...

Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

This paper studies the relationship between trust and foreign direct investment (FDI) in a crosssection of countries. Accounting for the issue endogeneity, this paper suggests that countries with a higher level of generalized trust attract more FDI than the low-trust countries.

This paper presents econometric evidence for a link between a country's level of egalitarianism and its inward foreign direct investment. In order to provide a theoretical rationale for this relationship, I embed Hart and Moore's (2008) novel contractual foundation into a simple model of global...

In recent decades, many countries experienced both a rise in top income shares and an increase of income inequality among the top earners. In this paper, I study the role of international trade as a catalyst for this development and analyze the associated welfare effects. I build a simple...

This paper develops a model of global sourcing with culturally dissimilar countries. Production of final goods requires the coordination of decisions between the headquarter of a multinational firm and managers of their component suppliers. Managers of both units are assumed to have strong...

Relational contracts - informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships - are integral parts of global production processes. This paper develops a repeated-game model of global sourcing in which final goods producers decide whether to engage with their suppliers in relational...

Contractual frictions are widely known to shape firm boundaries. But do better contracting institutions, which reduce these frictions, induce firms to be more or less deeply integrated? This paper provides a large-scale investigation of this question using a unique micro dataset of ownership...