This paper examines the question of whether less-developed countries' (LDCs') experiences with foreign direct investment (FDI) systematically different from those of developed countries (DCs). We do this by examining three types of empirical FDI studies that typically do not distinguish between...

Capital income tax policy affects investment by the parent and affiliates of multinational corporations (MNCs). In a model in which technical advances are embodied in new capital, investment will translate directly into productivity gains. In this paper, I use this framework to guide the growth...

Local governments spend roughly $1.6 trillion per year to provide a variety of public services ranging from police and fire protection to public schools and public transit. However, we know little about public sector's productivity in delivering key services. To understand the productivity both...

We investigate how criminal organizations strategically use violence to influence elections in order to get captured politicians elected. The model offers novel testable implications about the use of pre-electoral violence under different types of electoral systems and different degrees of...

FDI plays a central role in managing global production networks, but FDI statistics also reflect other factors, including tax avoidance, that make it difficult to differentiate between FDI for "long-term" investments that serves as a source of growth and FDI that is purely financial and has...

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies over the period 1982--2006 averaged 9.4 percent annually after taxes; U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged only 3.2 percent. Two factors distort...

We use a new firm level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries -- close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge from the data. Most foreign direct investment (FDI) occurs between rich...

The paper provides a reconciliation of Lucas' paradox, based on fixed setup costs of new investments. With such costs, it does not pay a firm to make a small' investment, even though such an investment is called for by marginal productivity conditions. Using a sample of 45 developed and...

We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between the years of 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to significant productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI...

We compare the relation between foreign affiliate production and parent employment in U.S. manufacturing multinationals with that in Swedish firms. U.S. multinationals appear to have allocated some of their more labor intensive operations selling in world markets to affiliates in developing...