Eskeland and Harrison find almost no evidence that investors in developing countries are fleeing environmental costs at home. Instead, the evidence suggests that foreign-owned plants in four developing countries are less polluting than comparable domestic plants.Are multinationals flocking to...

Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. This paper uses firm-level data for 89 countries to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms do not perform much worse than firms in other regions. But they do have structural problems,...

Recent trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). The authors use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized...

Pigou's conjecture was that under costly taxation public expenditures should not reach the point where marginal benefits equal marginal costs. In the treatment here, public expenditures (and environmental protection) may provide public goods for consumption but also collective inputs for...