Do contractual institutions and a country’s level of trust interact in their impact on the international make-or-buy decision? By analyzing explicit and implicit contracting in a unified framework, I show that better formal contractibility may both facilitate and hinder relational contracting...

This paper studies the relationship between trust and foreign direct investment (FDI) in a crosssection of countries. Accounting for the issue endogeneity, this paper suggests that countries with a higher level of generalized trust attract more FDI than the low-trust countries.

In recent decades, many countries experienced both a rise in top income shares and an increase of income inequality among the top earners. In this paper, I study the role of international trade as a catalyst for this development and analyze the associated welfare effects. I build a simple...

This paper presents econometric evidence for a link between a country’s level of egalitarianism and its inward foreign direct investment. In order to provide a theoretical rationale for this relationship, I embed Hart and Moore’s (2008) novel contractual foundation into a simple model of...

Informal long-term relationships and mutual confidence play a crucial role in modern economies in at least two dimensions. First, the performance of firms is strongly affected by their capacity to solve organizational questions effectively and this capacity is apparently strongly related to...

This paper explores the quantitative consequences of transatlantic trade liberalization envisioned in a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union. Our key innovation is to develop a new quantitative spatial trade model and to use an...