Drawing on recently completed firm-level surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Peru, this paper investigates the relationship between investment climate and international integration. These standardized surveys of large, random samples of firms in common...

Recent international experience has shown that excessively complex administrative procedures, required to establish, and operate a business, discourage inflows of foreign direct investment. The authors present a new database on the administrative costs faced by private investors in 32 developing...

The Employing Skilled Expatriates indicators analyze the skilled immigration regime relevant for foreign direct investment across 93 economies to provide comparable information about this regulatory space. The indicators focus on restrictions that control the inflow of skilled immigrants...

One of the strong messages that came out of the recent United Nations Climate Change conference in Durban was that the private sector has to play an important role if we are to globally move toward a low carbon, climate resilient -- or "climate compatible" -- future. However, private investment...

A model of firm innovation illustrates the effects of the threat of imitation and product varieties on a representative firm's decision to invest in research and development to produce new product varieties. The model motivates two empirical questions: (1) Is research and development partially...

This paper proposes a novel empirical methodology to reveal factors associated with foreign direct investment decisions and export success at the industry level. Faced with large amounts of policy and economic indicators, as well as significant product and sectoral diversity, the motivation of...

Foreign firms often have a more educated workforce and pay higher wages than domestic firms. This does not necessarily imply that foreign ownership translates into higher demand for educated workers or higher wages, since foreign investment may be guided by unobservable firm characteristics...

Using a cross-section of more than 25,000 domestic manufacturing firms in 78 low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses how mediating factors influence intra-industry productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment. It...

An unprecedented regime change following the 2017 presidential impeachment led to a dramatic shift to more rigid labor market policies in the Republic of Korea, represented by consecutive double-digit hikes in the minimum wage in the next two years. Using a firm-level data set with detailed...

By documenting the evolution of Tobin's q before, during, and after firms internationalize, the authors provide evidence on the bonding, segmentation, and market timing theories of internationalization. Using new data on 9,096 firms across 74 countries over the period 1989-2000, they find that...