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...

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...

This paper studies the impact of corporate acquisitions - both domestic and cross-border - on the uncertainty faced by acquiring firms. We use data for UK publicly-listed firms from 2004 to 2017 and employ a matching estimator combined with difference-in-differences to control for the endogenous...

We estimate a three-variate VAR using proxies of global financial uncertainty, the global financial cycle, and world industrial production to simulate the effects of the jump in financial uncertainty observed in correspondence of the Covid-19 outbreak. We predict the cumulative loss in world...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...