Outward direct investment (ODI) from the People's Republic of China (PRC) is surging. A common perception is that it was driven by the country's resource-seeking and technology-seeking motives. Using a new, unique, and comprehensive dataset that covers close to 10,000 Chinese ODI deals from 1998...

I discuss the role of economic theory in empirical work in development economics with special emphasis on general equilibrium and political economy considerations. I argue that economic theory plays (should play) a central role in formulating models, estimates of which can be used for...

Interactions between economic development and financial development are studied by looking at the roles of financial institutions in selecting R&D projects (including both imitation and innovation). Financial development is regarded as the evolution of the financing regimes. The effectiveness of...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures,...

We survey the empirical literature analysing the process of enterprise restructuring in transition economies. The survey provides new insights into the relative effectiveness of different reform policies, and into how this effectiveness varies across regions. We study the effects of...

In this paper firm level data are used to test whether competition affects productivity performance in three transition countries, Hungary, Romania and Slovenia. The data are based on interviews taken in more than 300 state-owned, privatized and newly-established private firms between September...

Some have suggested that housing policy, embodied by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and affordable housing goals of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), caused the subprime crisis. We examine if these programs led to worse mortgage outcomes using two approaches. The first examines...

The introduction of automatic bill payment (ABP) programs in 2005 eliminated the need for consumers to view recurring bills. If those enrolled in ABP programs offered by utilities and other service providers forgo inspection of their recurring bills, then price salience declines, prices...

This study investigates Korea's motivations for foreign aid allocation, analyzing panel data from over 180 countries for the last 20 years. The results show that Korea's aid allocation reflects both recipient needs and Korea's own national interests but does not consistently consider aid...