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...

This paper explores empirically whether and how FDI is affected if multinationals’ home countries change taxation of foreign earnings by switching from worldwide to territorial taxation. Our analysis employs data for German inbound FDI based on the ultimate investing country concept. We use a...

Per Magnus Wijkman was the first foreign observer to urge Iceland in print to regulate its fisheries by price. This was in 1975, nine years before the Icelandic fishing quota system came into effect, a system judged discriminatory and unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Iceland in 1998 (but...

This paper studies the social and economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in a large sample of countries. I stress, in particular, the importance of countries' interconnections to un-derstand the spread of the virus. I estimate a Global VAR model and exploit a dataset on existing social...

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...

The paper presents a political economy model linking terror and governments' respect for human rights. Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1973-2002, we then empirically analyze whether and to what extent terror affects human rights - measured by three indices covering a wide...