Genocides and mass atrocities do not arise spontaneously, but tend to be meticulously sourced and managed. As such the concern in this paper is with the role of businesses in these processes, with a particular focus on the agency and decision making of entrepreneurs and managers. We critically...

Incorporating family decisions in a two-period-model of the world economy, we show that trade liberalization may reduce child labour in developing countries where the initial share of skilled workers in the adult workforce – though not as large as in developed countries – is nonetheless...

There is no empirical evidence that trade exposure per se increases child labour. As trade theory and household economics lead us to expect, the cross-country evidence seems to indicate that trade reduces or, at worst, has no significant effect on child labour. Consistently with the theory, a...

Foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers in both developed and developing countries alike. Although a number of studies have documented and some attempted to explain this stylized fact, the issue...

While there has been a large empirical literature on productivity spillovers from foreign to domestic firms this literature treats the channels through which these spillover effects work as a black box. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature. Our results suggest that firms which...

Policy makers find it difficult to promote economic development through entrepreneurship and SMEs. In this paper we argue that this is because the positive impact of entrepreneurship is overestimated and its negative impact underestimated. It is moreover also because there is no unified...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...

To date there has been few systematic and comparative empirical analyses of the nature of economic development in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the patterns of structural change between 1980 and 2010, focusing on the...

This paper investigates the link between nationality of ownership and wage elasticities of labour demand at the level of the plant. In particular, we examine whether labour demand in multinationals becomes less elastic with respect to the wage if the plant has backward linkages with the local...