This paper investigates the impact of political leaders' migration experience on the quality of their leadership. We build up an original database on the personal background of 932 politicians who were at the head of the executive power in a developing country over the 1960-2004 period. We put...

This paper uses worldwide firm-level data to scrutinize the governance factors that favor gender diversity in leadership positions. Our results reveal that the gender of the dominant shareholder is key. The chief executive of firms with a female dominant shareholder has a significantly higher...

This paper examines international technology transfers using firm-level data across 43 developing countries. Our findings show that exporting and importing activities are important channels for the transfer of technology. Majority foreign-owned firms are less likely to engage in technological...

The stylized literature on foreign direct investment suggests that developing countries should invest in the human capital of their labour force in order to attract foreign direct investment. However, if educational quality in developing country is uncertain such that formal education is a noisy...

Mobility gives individuals access to different daily activities, facilities, and places, but at the cost of imposing environmental burdens. The sustainable growth of society is linked to green mobility (e.g., public transport, walking, cycling) as a way to alleviate individual carbon footprints....

We revisit the link between poverty, the middle class and institutional outcomes using a newly developed cross-country panel dataset containing detailed information on the distribution of income and expenditures. When the size of the middle class increases (measured as the proportion of people...

Utilitarian foundations for limited government are shaky insofar as they assume rational and consistent individuals. Recently economists' assumption of rational actors has come under sustained attack. Behavioural economics has suggested that people are plagued by irrational biases and...

This paper examines whether the introduction of corporate governance (CG) reforms in general and that of transparency and disclosure (T&D) rules in particular can necessarily boost firm performance. Existing literature suggests that CG reforms can boost performance because it can resolve the...

In this paper, we study how wage mobility in the low-wage sector has changed in western Germany between 1984 and 2004. Using German individual register data, we document a clear upward trend in the persistence of low-wage employment for both men and women. Next to compositional shifts of the...