This paper develops and tests the hypothesis that accounting rules mitigate the effect of tax policy on firm investment decisions by obscuring the timing of tax payments. I model a firm that maximizes a discounted weighted average of after-tax cash flows and accounting profits. I estimate the...

Discussions of financial risk often fail to distinguish between risks that are consciously borne and those that are not. To understand the breeding conditions for financial crises the prime focus of concern should not be simply on large risk-taking per se, but on the unintended, or unanticipated...

Using a sample of control cross-border acquisitions from 61 countries from 1990 to 2007, we find that acquirers from countries with better governance gain more from such acquisitions and their gains are higher when targets are from countries with worse governance. Other acquirer country...

Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being 'snakes' and 'spiders'. Snakes are...

This paper applies an interpretation of how globalization and governance (G&G) interact with convergence given Cape Verde and Mozambique's particular geographical and historical contexts. We hold that development success under globalization entails, necessarily but not exclusively, positive...

We construct a model of international trade and multinational production (MP) to examine the impact of globalization on the skill premium in skill-abundant and skill-scarce countries. The key mechanisms in our framework arise from the interaction between three elements: cross-country differences...

We propose a theory that rising globalization and rising wage inequality are related because trade liberalization raises the demand facing highly competitive skill-intensive firms. In our model, only the lowest-cost firms participate in the global economy exactly along the lines of Melitz...

Financial markets have become increasingly global in recent decades, yet the pricing of internationally traded assets continues to depend strongly upon local risk factors, leading to several observations that are difficult to explain with standard frameworks. Equity returns depend upon both...

Large gaps in labor productivity between the traditional and modern parts of the economy are a fundamental reality of developing societies. In this paper, we document these gaps, and emphasize that labor flows from low-productivity activities to high-productivity activities are a key driver of...

Using the 2007-09 financial crisis as a laboratory, we analyze the transmission of crises to country-industry equity portfolios in 55 countries. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative of...