Casual observation suggests that cultural differences play an important role in business transactions, yet systematic evidence on this relationship is scarce. This paper provides a novel investigation of the effect of cultural distance on multinational firms’ decisions to integrate their...

It is tricky to design local regulations on global externalities, especially so if firms are mobile. We show that when costs and outside options are firms’ private information, the threat of firm relocation leads to local regulations that are stricter, not looser. This result is general and...

This paper analyzes the initial impact and recovery of globally engaged firms from the COVID-19 crisis. It uses rich survey data of nearly 65,000 firm-year observations in 45 countries spanning three waves of data collection. The findings are organized in a series of stylized facts, which...

Firm-to-firm relationships in global value chains create opportunities for North-South technology diffusion. This paper studies technology transfer in value chains when contracts are incomplete and input production technologies are imperfectly excludable. The paper introduces a new taxonomy of...

Did multinational production (MP) exacerbate or mitigate the collapse of international trade during the Great Recession? What role did MP and trade links play in propagating economic shocks across countries? I resolve the “Multinationals’ Resilience Puzzle” during the Great Recession by...

NGO campaigns against firms with value chains involving production in developing and emerging economies are a salient feature of economic globalization. What determines the patterns of the internationalization of NGO campaigns? Stylized facts obtained from recently available data containing 102...

We show that in successful episodes of export market entry, there are statistically and economically significant post-entry dynamics of quantities, but no post-entry dynamics of markups. This suggests that shifts in demand play an important role in successful entry, but that firms do not use...

High-performance firms typically have two features in common: i) they produce in more than one country and ii) they produce more than one product. In this paper, we analyze the internationalization strategies of multi-product firms at the product-level. We find that the most productive firms...

We focus on the role that the transmission of information between a multilateral (the IMF) and a country has for the optimal design of conditional reforms. Our model predicts that when agency problems are especially severe, and/or IMF information is valuable, a centralized control is indeed...