This paper explores the links between exports, export destinations and skill utilization by firms. We identify two mechanisms behind these links, which we integrate into a unified theory of export destinations and skills. First, exporting to high-income countries with higher valuation for...

The home-market effect, first hypothesized by Linder (1961) and later formalized by Krugman (1980), is the idea that countries with larger demand for some products at home tend to have larger sales of the same products abroad. In this paper, we develop a simple test of the home-market effect...

This paper evaluates the influence of host-country financial development on the global operations of multinational firms. Using detailed U.S. data, we provide evidence that host-country financial development increases entry by multinational affiliates, while also decreasing affiliate sales in...

"A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...

We use a natural experiment in the form of 121 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states to show that tax considerations are a first-order determinant of firms' capital structure choices. Over the period 1990-2011, firms increase long-term leverage by 104 basis points on...

This paper considers a dynamic, non-steady state environment in which wage dispersion exists and evolves in response to shocks. Workers do not observe firm productivity and firms do not commit to future wages, but there is on-the-job search for higher paying jobs. The model allows for firm...

A recent literature has introduced heterogeneous firms into models of international trade. This literature has adopted the convention of treating individual firms as points on a continuum. While the continuum offers many advantages this convenience comes at some cost: (1) Shocks to individual...

We provide theoretical and empirical evidence that policy uncertainty can significantly affect firm level investment and entry decisions in the context of international trade. When market entry costs are sunk, policy uncertainty can create a real option value of waiting to enter foreign markets...

This paper provides the first comprehensive documentation of the main features of corporate bond issues in domestic and international markets and analyzes how firms use these markets after they internationalize. We find that debt issues in domestic and international bond markets have different...

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...