Countries that strike it rich when exploring for oil and gas often fail to see growth materialize. This paper shows that one way things can get messy is via squandering new wealth, based on future resource revenues, on arms imports. In the five years following a giant oil or gas discovery, arms...

Foreign direct investment may play an important role in transferring technologies from high-income to emerging economies, which can lead to uneven effects on the wages of skilled and unskilled workers. This paper combines project-level data on greenfield foreign direct investment with household...

In this paper we combine the tariff evasion analysis of Fisman and Wei (2004) with Rauch and Trindade’s (2002) study of Chinese trade networks. Chinese networks are known to act as trade catalysts by enforcing contracts and providing market information. As tariff evasion occurs outside the...

This paper uses an untapped dataset on Swiss immigration and a novel instrumental variable to test three channels through which migrants promote trade. The main finding is that migrant networks are an effective substitute for formal institutions in facilitating trade. The effect takes place...

This paper provides an empirical assessment of race-to-the-bottom unilateralism. It suggests that decades of unilateral tariff cutting in Asia?s emerging economies have been driven by a competition to attract FDI from Japan. Using spatial econometrics, I show that tariffs on parts and...