Foreign direct investment (FDI) in services has grown significantly in recent years. Evidence of spatial relationships in FDI decisions have been provided for goods manufacturing by utilizing physical distance-based measures of trade costs. This paper investigates spatial interactions for...

Current literature shows a significant negative impact of terrorism on countries economies. We explore this relationship in more detail. Using an unbalanced panel of over 160 countries for up to 25 years and the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) we show a decrease in FDI as a consequence of...

This paper examines whether credit constraints affect Chinese firms' absorption of productivity spillovers from foreign firms. Using firm-level data for 2001-2005, we find evidence of positive spillovers originating from FDI from countries other than Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan for non-state...

When searching for productivity spillovers from foreign firms, a firm is typically classified as foreign using a low threshold of direct foreign ownership. Instead, we advocate an ‘ultimate owner' definition because (i) ultimate ownership includes indirect ownership links that are prevalent in...

We investigate the effects of two reforms of temporary employment using panel data on Italian firms. We exploit variation in their implementation across regions and sectors for identification. We find that the reform of apprenticeship contracts increased job turnover and induced the substitution...

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing information to principals about teacher...