Firms need to incur substantial sunk costs to break in foreign markets, yet may give up exporting shortly after their first experience, which typically involves very small sales. Conversely, other new exporters shoot up their foreign sales and expand to new destinations. We investigate a simple...

We study the dynamic support for fiscal decentralisation in a political agency model from the perspective of a region. We show that corruption opportunities are lower under centralization at each period of time. However, centralization makes more difficult for citizens to detect corrupt...

We study the incentives to expropriate foreign capital under democracy and obligarchy. We model a two-sector small open economy where foreign investment triggers Stolper-Samuelson effects through reducing exporting costs. We show how incentives to expropriate depend on the distributional effects...

Starting with a world where all countries apply Nash-optimal tariffs aginst all imports, we ask when , if ever, a group of countries can gain by trading freely ("promise") and when, if ever, it pays an outsider to join them ("attractiveness").

The simplest flat tax proposals envisage a single marginal tax rate applying on all income. In the context of a simple model where agents vary in ability to earn, we demonstrate (a) that everyone is better off in the long run with an income-tax exemption for investment, than without it, and (b)...

The recent literature on endogenous political institutions highlights domestic economic factors, such as recessions, economic growth and inequality, as key determinants of political transitions. We argue that international capital flows and the possibility that foreign governments, in order to...

We model subsidy competition for a foreign MNC’s investment in a two-country PTA. Taking into account acquisitions as an alternative investment mode weakens the case for subsidising greenfield investment, even for a single government. Considering competition between member states, it widens...

The European Union's agricultural policies are wasteful, and Britain's share of the burdens of them are disproportionately large. Nonetheless, enlargement of the European Union in the 1970s and 1980s appears to have raised new members's growth rates (with the single exception of Grece). In...

There is an extensive literature that examines the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and the productivity and competitiveness of domestic firms. Using estimation techniques from the productivity spillover literature, this paper tests for the presence of environmental...