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

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...

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 firms to become multinational. Therefore, we build a stylized model of segmented labor markets with...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of poverty convergence in aggregate data despite the conditional convergence of per capita income levels and the close linkage between growth and...

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.

Previous research has documented a strong correlation between countries’ income levels and the quality of their export goods. Given the evidence of fast unconditional convergence in export quality, this raises the question how to reconcile these stylized facts with a stable world income...