Gains from productivity and knowledge transmission arising from the presence of foreign firms has received a good deal of empirical attention, but micro-foundations for this mechanism are weak . Here we focus on production by foreign experts who may train domestic unskilled workers who work with...

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects the innovation incentives of firms, and what this implies for industry productivity and social welfare. For this purpose we develop a reciprocal dumping model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D. We identify two...

This paper studies why multinational firms often share ownership of a foreign affiliate with a local partner even in the absence of government restrictions on ownership. We show that shared ownership may arise, if (i) the partner owns assets that are potentially important for the investment...

This paper develops an efficiency theory of contingent trade policies. We model the competition for a domestic market between one domestic and one foreign firm as a pricing game under incomplete information about production costs. The cost distributions are asymmetric because the foreign firm...

We use Japanese microdata to examine how financial market frictions affect foreign direct investment (FDI). The Japanese land price bubble and banking trouble in the late 1980s and early 1990s serve as a quasi natural experiment to identify two possible transmission channels from financial...

This paper discusses environmental policies in response to foreign direct investment (FDI) in a symmetrie two-country setting, where firms' behavior affects government policy decisions. We show that two alternative equilibria with FDI are possible: (i) one with unilateral FDI, where one firm is...