Both empirical and theoretical literature show that multinational firms exhibit a competitive advantage before investing abroad. However, there are no clear empirical results regarding the ex-post effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on firm performance, partially due to the inadequacy of...

We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer-employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments...