Globalisation is one of the primary accused culprits of growing income inequality in the developed world. In particular, outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) is often associated with general “skill upgrading" in the home country, that is, a shift in relative labour demand from low skilled...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in services has grown significantly in recent years. Evidence of spatial relationships in FDI decisions have been provided for goods man- ufacturing by utilizing physical distance-based measures of trade costs. This paper investigates spatial interactions for...

Among the many concerns over globalization is that as nations compete for mobile firms, they will relax labour standards as a method of lowering costs and attracting investment. Using spatial estimation on panel data for 148 developing countries over 18 years, we find that the labour standards...

The key result of the so-called “New Trade Theory” is that countries gain from falling trade costs by an increase in the number of varieties available to consumers. Though the number of varieties in a given country rises, it is also true that global variety decreases from increased...

We study the optimal combination of corporate tax rate and tax base in a model of a small open economy with heterogeneous firms. We show that it is optimal for the small country's government to effectively subsidize capital inputs by granting a tax allowance in excess of the true costs of...

We present a new model of tax induced transfer pricing as an alterna- tive to the oft-used concealment model. Inspired by interviews with practi- tioners, we consider a large multinational firm which is audited by the tax authority in the high-tax location. When this country adjusts the transfer...

The debate over the use of tariffs or value added taxes in developing countries has focused on the difficulty of collecting VAT from the informal sector of the economy. This paper contributes by considering this issue with heterogeneous firms and endogenous entry. This yields two new results....

One of the greatest concerns over globalisation is its impact on the environment. This paper contributes to this debate by analysing the consequences of becoming an exporter on a firm's energy consumption. We show both theoretically and empirically that for low fuel intensity firms exporting...

Until recently, government procurement bidding processes have generally favored domestic firms by awarding the contract to a domestic firm even if a foreign firm tenders a lower bid, so long as the difference between the two is sufficiently small. This has been replaced by an agreement...

In this paper we directly test the proposed productivity hierarchy of direct, indirect and non-exporters using firm-level data from 105 developing and transition countries. Using both regression analysis and propensity score matching, we find strong evidence to suggest that direct exporters are...