Large-scale land acquisitions, or "land grabs", concentrate in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendly setting caused by a weak institutional framework. We argue that corrupt elites exploit this given institutional set-up to strike deals with international...

Large-scale land acquisitions often take place in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendliness caused by weak institutional frameworks. We hypothesize that corruption indeed leads to more land deals. We argue that corrupt elites exploit poor institutional setups...

In this paper, we study the impacts of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) between the EU countries and China on EU home investments. We consider BITs as "treatments" that provide further access to global value chains (GVCs). We identify the causal impacts of the BITs on the relationship...