One of the most striking aspects of the recent recession is the collapse in international trade. This paper uses disaggregated data on U.S. imports and exports to shed light on the anatomy of this collapse. We find that the recent reduction in trade relative to overall economic activity is far...

This paper analyzes the impact of international trade on the quality of institutions, such as contract enforcement, property rights, or investor protection. It presents a model in which imperfect institutions create rents for some parties within the economy, and are a source of comparative...

This paper examines how external finance dependence, financial development, and institutions influence brownfield foreign direct investment (FDI). We develop a model of cross-border acquisitions in which the foreign acquirer's choice of ownership structure reflects a trade-off between easing...

In this paper we examine the relationship between exchange rate movements and firm value. We estimate the exchange rate exposure of publicly listed firms in a sample of eight (non-US) industrialized and emerging markets, and find that a significant percentage of these firms are indeed exposed....

Are firms that engage in trade more vulnerable to exchange rate risk? Or, put another way, that exchange rate movements will influence firm asset value through the trade channel. In this paper we examine the relationship between exchange rate movements, firm value and trade. Our empirical work...

Finance theory suggests that changes in exchange rates should have little influence on asset prices in a world that has become increasingly with integrated capital markets. Indeed, the existing literature examining the relationship between international stock prices and exchange rates finds...

One possible explanation for home bias is that investors may obtain indirect international diversification benefits by investing in multinational firms rather than by investing directly in foreign markets. This paper employs mean-variance spanning tests to examine the diversification potential...

Recent quantitative studies predict large welfare gains from reducing tax distortions in a closed economy, despite costly transitional dynamics to more efficient tax systems. This paper examines transitional dynamics and gains of tax reforms for countries in a global economy, and provides...

This paper proposes a method for computing tax rates using national accounts and revenue statistics. Using this method we construct time-series of tax rates for large industrial countries. The method identifies the revenue raised by different taxes at the general government level and defines...

This paper studies the cross-border transactions in equity by investors in Canada, Germany,Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. We find that investors from different countries make very different decisions about the allocation of their portfolio across markets. In contradiction to the notion that high...