Banks play a critical role in international trade by providing trade finance products that reduce the risk of exporting. This paper employs two new data sets to shed light on the magnitude and structure of this business, which, as we show, is highly concentrated in a few large banks. The two...

This study provides evidence that shocks to the supply of trade finance have a causal effect on U.S. exports. The identification strategy exploits variation in the importance of banks as providers of letters of credit across countries. The larger a U.S. bank’s share of the trade finance market...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in services has grown significantly in recent years. Evidence of spatial relationships in FDI decisions have been provided for goods manufacturing by utilizing physical distance-based measures of trade costs. This paper investigates spatial interactions for...

Relocation is a way of reducing costs, thus increasing competitiveness, by splitting production and services between countries. The main argument kindling the relocation debate suggests that moving abroad generates job losses in the home country, while production and job gains appear only in the...

The paper aims to verify the existence of the Flying Geese Model (FGM) in the case of inward FDI in Central European Countries (CECs) which are new EU member states; more precisely, to find out in what way and to what extent FDI has contributed to catching up, i.e. to the restructuring process...

Romania has experienced a drawn-out transformation process and received relatively low amounts of foreign direct investment (FDI). But it has become competitive in labour-intensive manufacturing industries through the integration into European company networks by processing trade. The country...

Since the late 1990s investors have been faced with new challenges due to changing locational characteristics in the Central European transition countries. Export demand became the main driving force of manufacturing FDI as opposed to local-market penetration in earlier years. In addition,...

This paper applies a gravity model to foreign direct investment (FDI) stocks in five countries of Southeast Europe from nine selected Western European source countries, using five countries of Central Europe as a control group. Basic elements of the economic theory on FDI are shortly reviewed,...

This paper examines the relationship between offshoring activity by U.S. multinational firms and the structure of U.S trade preferences. We combine firm level panel data on U.S. foreign affiliate activity from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) with detailed measures of U.S. trade...

Cross-country regressions suggest that urbanization and FDI are important drivers of growth. However, it is not clear that primacy eventually hurts growth performance. Since it is tough to interpret cross-country growth regressions, we provide detailed evidence on the determinants of outward FDI...