Anecdotal evidence suggests that new CEOs with foreign backgrounds direct their firms to become more international in their operations. We examine this hypothesis formally using data on U.S. S&P-500 manufacturing firms from 1992 through 1997 and biographical information on CEOs' birth and...

Free trade or preferential trade areas (PTAs) allow importers who belong to the area to export to each other while paying zero or preferential tariffs as long as Rules of Origin (ROOs) are met. Meeting them is costly not only in terms of production costs but also in terms of documentation costs....

But the disappointments can also be attributed to the preferences because they discouraged additional value-addition in assembly and stimulated the use of expensive fabrics that were unlikely to be produced locally. When the MFA was removed, constrained countries such as China moved strongly...

This paper builds a tractable partial equilibrium model in the spirit of Melitz (2003), which incorporates two dimensions of heterogeneity: firms specific productivity shocks and firm-market specific demand shocks. The structural parameters of interest are estimated using only cross-sectional...

We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters...

This paper focuses on the effects of rules of origin in Free Trade Areas. We first point out that even rules of origin which are not restrictive, namely those which do not raise costs of production, have very pronounced effects on trade and investment flows. We then look at some different ways...

We model the effects of consumption-type taxes which differ according to the base and location of the tax. Our model incorporates a multinational producing and selling in two countries with three sources of rent, each in a different location: a fixed basic production factor (located with initial...

This chapter was prepared for the Handbook of International Economics (Vol. 5) edited by Gita Gopinath, Elhanan Helpman, and Kenneth Rogoff. We provide a review of the recent literature -- both theoretical and empirical -- analyzing the multi-dimensional connections between globalization and...

This paper studies the expansion patterns of the multinational enterprise (MNE) in time and space. Using a long panel of US MNEs, we document that MNE affiliates usually start with sales exclusively to the host market and eventually enter export markets, and that this extensive margin of...