This paper argues that Japanese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in China plays a critical role in home and host country's bilateral trade imbalances with the U.S. Using six cross-sectional panel data from 1981 to 2007, we find strong evidence in support of the role of Japanese FDI in mounting...

Multinational firms (MNEs) dominate trade flows, yet their global production decisions are often ignored in firm-level studies of exporting and importing. Using newly merged data on US firms' trade and multinational activity by country, we show that MNEs are more likely to trade not only with...

"Factoryless" manufacturers, as defined by the U.S. OMB, perform underlying entrepreneurial components of arranging the factors of production but outsource all of the actual transformation activities to other specialized units. This paper describes efforts to measure "factoryless" manufacturing...

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...

This paper estimates the effects of offshoring on productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2000, using instrumental variables estimation to address the potential endogeneity of offshoring. It finds that service offshoring has a significant positive effect on productivity in...

The global economic crisis sent world trade volume and world production into retreat and threatened a second Great Depression. There has emerged a consensus that global imbalances – fundamentally reflected in the over-reliance upon the United States (US) consumer market – that built up over...

Why are foreigners willing to invest almost $2 trillion per year in the United States? The answer affects if the existing pattern of global imbalances can persist and if the United States can continue to finance its current account deficit without a major change in asset prices and returns. This...

This paper investigates the effects of multinational corporations on labor standards. We argue that the previous literature has failed to distinguish the different motives that encourage firms to become multinational. Therefore, we build a stylized model of segmented labor markets with...