This paper uses a panel data from developing countries to study the relationship between foreign aid flows and fertility rates. By making use of natural disasters in neighboring countries as an instrumental variable to foreign aid receipts,I find that a percentage point increase in the share of...

The literature on knowledge diffusion shows that knowledge decays strongly with distance. In this paper we document that the probability a product is added to a country?s export basket is, on average, 65% larger if a neighboring country is a successful exporter of that same product. For existing...

To what extent do barriers to knowledge transmission influence a firm?s decision to expand? Using a worldwide dataset on foreign subsidiaries, I show that multinational corporations are, on average, about 12% less likely to horizontally expand a sector that is one standard deviation above the...

To what extent are migrants a source of evolution of the comparative advantage of both their sending and receiving countries? We study the drivers of knowledge diffusion by looking at the dynamics of the export basket of countries. The main finding is that migration is a strong and robust driver...