This paper uses micro-data from the World Bank Investment Climate Surveys 2002-2006 to investigate how foreign ownership and access to external finance affect the likelihood of manufacturers in emerging markets to export and/or import. Applying propensity score matching to control for...

This paper models a multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) as a coordination device. Multinational enterprises can invest in any number of countries. Without a multilateral investment agreement, expropriation triggers an investment stop by the single MNE. Under a multilateral agreement,...

Multinational corporations can shift income into low-tax countries through transfer pricing and debt financing. While most developed countries use thin capitalization rules to limit the extent to which a subsidiary can be financed with internal debt, a number of developing countries do not. In...

Firms are under increasing pressure to meet stakeholders’ demand for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) along their global value chains. We study the incentives for and investments in CSR at different stages of the production process. We analyze a model of sequential production with...

Multinational enterprises are often accused to have a preference for investing in countries in which the working populations' civil and political rights are largely disregarded. This paper presents an empirical investigation of the popular political repression boosts FDI hypothesis and arrives...

Economists around the world rely in addition to official statistics on business (and consumer) surveys, which are more up-to-date. However, for many emerging and developing countries there is a lack of such surveys. This gap can, at least partly, be filled by the Ifo World Economic Survey (WES)....

How did the rise of multinational enterprises (MNEs) put pressure on the prevailing international corporate tax framework? MNEs, and firms with market power, are not new phenomena, nor is the corporate income tax, which dates to the early 20th century. This prompts the question, what is...

This paper investigates whether the higher prevalence of South multinational enterprises (MNEs) in risky developing countries may be explained by the experience that they have acquired of poor institutional quality at home. We confirm the intuition provided by our analytical model by empirically...

The governments of many developing countries seek to attract inbound foreign direct investment (FDI) through the use of tax incentives for multinational corporations (MNCs). The effectiveness of these tax incentives depends crucially on MNCs' residence country tax regime, especially where the...