We study the causal effect of country-specific democratic regime change on bilateral trade flows, extending structural gravity empirics to 'heterogeneous gravity' estimated at the country-pair level. Our difference-in-differences implementation accounts for selection into regime change,...

This paper investigates whether the higher prevalence of South multinational enterprises (MNEs) in risky developing countries may be explained by the experience that they have acquired of poor institutional quality at home. We confirm the intuition provided by our analytical model by empirically...

Relying on a large foreign direct investment (FDI) transaction level dataset, unique both in terms of disaggregation and time and country coverage, this paper examines patterns in greenfield (GF) versus merger & acquisition (MA) investment. Although both are found to seek out large markets with...

The Everything But Arms agreement, introduced by the EU in 2001, eliminated duties on most imports from the least developed countries. To avail of these benefits, however, the exported product must contain a sufficiently large share of local content. Thus, the agreement may have affected both...

Export processing zones (EPZs) are an increasingly common type of special economic zone. They are designed to facilitate international trade by lowering trade costs, such as import duties and/or export taxes. EPZs should thus be particularly attractive locations for multinational enterprises...

Recent empirical work has established that 'democracy causes growth'. In this paper, we determine the underlying institutions which drive this relationship using data from the Varieties of Democracy project. We sketch how incentives and opportunities as well as the distribution of political...

A large body of literature on the estimation of private returns to R&D adopts the Griliches knowledge production framework, ignoring the impact omitted spillover effects may have on consistent estimation. A separate body of literature is primarily interested in the presence and magnitude of...

A large body of literature on the estimation of private returns to R&D adopts the Griliches knowledge production framework, ignoring the impact omitted spillover eects may have on consistent estimation. A separate body of literature is primarily interested in the presence and magnitude of...

This paper provides the first micro-level evidence for the existence and patterns of intra-national protectionism in China. We demonstrate that drug advertising inspections are used by provincial governments to discriminate against firms from outside the province and document how the degree of...

This paper challenges established claims of comparable degrees of market integration in Europe and China on the eve of industrialization. Our empirical strategy focuses on the dynamics of price convergence and accounts for general equilibrium effects arising from common shocks and network...