Studies of female business leaders and economic performance are rarely conducted with worldwide observational data, and with considerations on the underlying cultural, institutional, and business environment. This paper uses worldwide, firm-level data from more than 100 countries to study how...

Trade growth has slowed sharply since the global financial crisis. U.S. trade data highlights that arm's-length trade--trade between unaffiliated firms--accounts disproportionately for the overall post-crisis trade slowdown. This is partly because arm's-length trade depends more heavily than...

This paper examines the role of multinational enterprises in sustainability reporting. The study assesses how multinational enterprise status correlates with a company's average disclosure rate and probability of reporting on economic, labor and social, environmental, and governance indicators....

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...

As free trade areas have proliferated and statutory tariffs have been dramatically reduced in recent decades, non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to international trade have risen in importance. Destination-specific product standards are one of the major types of NTBs as they impose additional costs on...

As globalization has intensified, multinational enterprises' investments have become a sophisticated set of financial transactions that are difficult to monitor and classify by the home and host countries. In some cases, what is classified as foreign direct investment is rather "indirect foreign...

The diffusion of knowledge plays a central role in endogenous growth theories. Simply put, in these models new knowledge can be generated from preexisting knowledge. In other words, existing knowledge is a pure public good, which can benefit any economic agent anywhere. More generally,...

Special economic zones can be an effective instrument to promote industrialization if implemented properly in the right context. In China, starting in the 1980s, special economic zones were used as a testing ground for the country's transition from a planned to a market economy, and they are a...