In this paper we investigate the macroeconomic impact of natural disasters in developing countries by examining hurricane strikes in the Central American and Caribbean region. Our innovation in this regard is to employ a windfield model combined with a power dissipation equation on hurricane...

While there have been some references in the literature to the potential role of the general decline in rainfall in sub-Saharan African nations on their poor growth performance relative to other developing countries, this avenue remains empirically unexplored. In this paper we use a new...

This paper analyses and compares the dynamics of agglomeration in Portuguese and Irish manufacturing industries between 1985 and 1998 implementing Dumais, Ellison and Glaeser (2002)'s methodology. Using comparable and exhaustive micro-level data sets, we find that industries tend to be subject...

This paper examines the impact of climatic change on the level of total agricultural production of Sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) and non-Sub-Sahara Africa (NSSA) developing countries. In doing so it uses a new cross-country panel climatic dataset in an agricultural production framework. The results...

We measure the effect of R&D spillovers on plant productivity by taking account of (i) the national origin of the spillovers, (ii) the mechanism through which spillovers may flow (FDI and/or imports), (iii) the sectoral scope of spillovers, as well as (iv) their geographic scope, in a single...

This Paper presents an empirical study of the effect of foreign multinational companies on the development of indigenous firms in the host country. Our starting point is a recent paper by Markusen and Venables (1999) that shows formally that multinationals, through the creation of linkages with...

Many previous studies have shown that the localization of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a non-parametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal...

According to the ‘convergence hypothesis’, multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998)...

While foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers, the causes of this remain unresolved. In a two-period bargaining framework we show that if training is more productive and specific in foreign firms,...