In weak intellectual property rights (IPR) environments, the imitation of proprietary technology by domestic firms has become a deterrent for foreign investment. Different multinationals may view this deterrent differently. This paper develops a model where firms with more technology are less...

Over the last decade China's investment in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) has increased substantially in volume and become more diversified from natural resources to other industries. Using cross-border mergers and acquisitions data, we demonstrate that since mid-2010s China's overseas...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms -financial reforms, trade liberalization, and privatization- as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

This paper examines a country''s incentives for intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in a global trading environment. There is a time inconsistency problem intrinsic to IPR protection: ex ante strong protection is warranted to promote innovation, but once discovery takes place there is...

This paper extends the q-theory of investment to model explicitly the decision of firms to invest in intangibles and measures the contribution of intangible goods to the overall capital stock in the U.S. The model highlights the embodiment of intangible goods in tangibles and the role of...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of a government regulation that forces a patented equipment to be supplied by a number of independent producers. On the one hand, such a regulation hurts the value of a patent and therefore reduces activities in the R&D sector. On the other hand, the...

This paper constructs a data set to document firms'' expenditures on an identifiable list of intangible items and examines the implications of treating intangible spending as an acquisition of final (investment) goods on GDP growth for Canada. It finds that investment in intangible capital by...