This paper investigates the factors associated with foreign direct investment "surges" and "stops," defined as sharp increases and decreases, respectively, of gross foreign direct investment inflows to the developing world and differentiated based on whether these events are led by waves in...

Evidence shows that foreign direct investment can provide many benefits to host countries, including productivity improvements, better jobs, and knowledge transfer. Further, it can serve as a vehicle for transformation of domestic production and better integration with global value chains....

This paper investigates the effect that tight credit conditions had on outward foreign direct investment flows during the 2008-2010 global financial crisis. A difference-in-differences approach is used to isolate a "credit channel" impact of the global financial crisis on foreign direct...

This paper examines how different establishments performed during the recent global financial crisis, focusing on the role of foreign ownership. The paper investigates how foreign ownership affected establishments' responses to negative economic shocks, using a cross-country panel dataset with...

The 2007-2008 upsurge in agricultural commodity prices gave rise to widespread concern about investors causing a "global land rush" . Large land deals can provide opportunities for better access to capital, transfer of technology, and advances in productivity and employment generation. But they...

This paper documents an unusual and possibly significant phenomenon: The export of skills embodied in goods, services, or capital from poorer to richer countries. We first present a set of stylized facts. Using a measure that combines the sophistication of a country's exports with the average...

This paper evaluates the heterogeneous impact of spillovers from multinational corporations (MNCs) to domestic enterprises in the developing world. It empirically investigates two transmission channels of knowledge spillovers. First, direct contractual linkages between indigenous firms and MNCs....

The acceleration of natural resource discoveries across many parts of the developing world has highlighted the urgent need for solutions to the mismanagement of windfalls that has blighted many countries over the past half-century. One proposal involves distributing annually a share of resource...

This paper examines whether domestic output growth helps attract capital inflows and, in turn, capital inflows help boost output growth in a set of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using a two-step approach to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues, the paper finds that output...

The main focus of the paper is the measurement of the potential for externalities related to foreign direct investment. A series of novel proxies are drawn from the Enterprise Survey database of the World Bank-IFC and tested against hypotheses considered in the foreign direct investment...