This paper investigates which firms suffer from informal competition and highlights the role of access to finance in this context. We use cross-sectional data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys covering 42,000 firms in 114 developing and transition countries for the period 2006 to 2011 and...

This paper traces the human capital development of 14 Asian countries for the period of 1900-60, using the age-heaping method. We place special emphasis on the gender gap in numeracy and its determinants. In particular, we test the validity of a U-hypothesis of gender equality, implying that...

How and to what extent can deep preferential trade agreements (PTAs) support the upgrading of companies from developing countries within global value chains (GVCs)? This question is of increasing importance, as PTAs have become the trade instrument of choice of major trading powers, and their...

This paper documents that cross-border investment income flows are important for explaining current account balances in major economies. Those investment incomes reflect returns on cross-border asset holdings and on balance often reach magnitudes around 5% of major economies' gross domestic...

I use the STAN database of the OECD and different econometric methods to investigate the effects of exports towards the EU-15 on wages in the Visegrad countries (CEEC-4; Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). The results do not allow to draw any definite statements about this effect....

This paper offers an introduction to the special issue on FDI and multinational corporations. It summarizes the contents of the five papers included, and relates them to the recent litera-ture on the subject.

This paper examines the impact of industrial robots on jobs. We combine data on robot adoption and occupations by industry in 37 economies for the period 2005-2015. We exploit differences across industries in technical feasibility-defined as the industry's share of tasks replaceable by robots-to...

We investigate the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade, as two measures of globalization, on female labor force participation in a sample of 80 developing countries over the last decades. Contrary to the mainstream view in the literature, which is mainly based on country-case...

This paper investigates the effects of multinational corporations on labor standards. We argue that the previous literature has failed to distinguish the different motives that encourage fi rms to become multinational. Therefore, we build a stylized model of segmented labor markets with...

In this paper, we investigate whether better information about the macroeconomic environment of an economy has a positive impact on its capital inflows, namely portfolio and foreign direct investment (FDI). The purpose of our study is to explicitly quantify information asymmetries by compliance...