Stringent labor laws can provide firms a commitment device to not punish short-run failures and thereby spur their employees to pursue value-enhancing innovative activities. Using patents and citations as proxies for innovation, we identify this effect by exploiting the time-series variation...

Do entrepreneurs earn supernormal returns, or does competitive pressure ensure that entrepreneurs receive the same utility level as workers? If those who run their own businesses get supernormal returns (or 'rents') they should be happier than those who work as employees. The paper tests this...

How does firm entry affect innovation incentives and productivity growth in incumbent firms? Micro-data suggests that there is heterogeneity across industries--incumbents in technologically advanced industries react positively to foreign firm entry, but not in laggard industries. To explain this...

Because of the differing forms that international agreements on trade in goods and trade in services take in the GATT (1994) and the GATS there is an incompatibility between measures of world trade in goods and services. Measures of goods trade reflecting GATT (1994) are restricted to trade that...

We examine effective tax rates (ETRs) for 9,022 multinationals from 87 countries from 2006 to 2011. We find that, despite extensive investments in international tax avoidance, multinationals headquartered in Japan, the U.S., and some high-tax European countries continue to face substantially...

Foreign-owned firms from advanced countries carry the culture of transparency in business transactions that is orthogonal to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in many developing economies and economies in transition. In this paper, we document this using administrative data on reported...

This paper applies a logistic smooth transition regression approach to the estimation of a homogenous aggregate value added production function of the State Owned (SOE) and Foreign-Funded Enterprises (FFE) in China, 1980s-2007. The transition associated with the economic reforms in China is...

According to the U.S. external accounts, U.S. investors earn a significantly higher rate of return on their foreign investments than foreigners earn in the United States. This continued strong performance has produced a positive net investment income balance despite the deterioration in the U.S....

This paper examines the welfare effects of a tax on foreign purchases of domestic land. Using a simple static framework the paper shows that an appropriately chosen tax will generally be welfare-improving for the domestic country

Within Japanese multinational firms, parent exports from Japan to a foreign region are positively related to production in that region by affiliates of that parent, given the parent's home production in Japan and the region's size and income level. This relationship is similar to that found for...