We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

Water use in the U.S. has followed a remarkable pattern since 1950, not mimicking the almost uninterrupted 110 percent increase in the size of the U.S. population, the relatively steady 570 percent growth in real GDP, and the 220 percent improvement in per capita GDP. After doubling between 1950...

How does outward foreign direct investment (FDI) affect employment growth of the multinationals (MNCs) in the home country? Does the impact of outward investment differ by the level of development of the destination country of the FDI? Using a difference-in-difference approach, we assess the...

Explaining the strong growth of world trade with the relatively moderate tariff reductions since WW II is a quantitative challenge. The trade of new goods resulting from tariff reductions, it has been conjectured, might be the missing link. We investigate this hypothesis with very disaggregate...

With a firm-level dataset, we study the location decision of all South Korean multinationals across China's regions between 1992 and 2004, taking into account spatial aspects. Our conditional logit estimates confirm previous studies that stress the agglomeration effects along industry and along...

I study the internal organization of production between the parent and the affiliate in the multinational corporation (MNC) and the extent to which it depends on the factor abundance of the destination country of the affiliates relative to the home country. I use a unique South Korean firm-level...

It is a well-established theoretical result that the trade policy of a large country can directly affect its own and other countries' welfare by affecting international goods prices. However, there exist very few empirical studies that analyze the effect of trade policy on international prices....

We study the significant variation in intrafirm versus arm’s-length trade with micro data. Exploiting the fact that Korean is an uncommon second language and that Korean culture is relatively homogenous, we show how intrafirm sourcing by South Korean affiliates abroad increases with their...

Freshwater scarcity is bound to be a major challenge of the 21st century. Drawing on newly available data, I investigate to what extent countries make efficient use of the very uneven water resources on a global scale. In particular, I find that countries that are relatively water abundant tend...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign-affiliate sales. We find that for...