FDI from the European Union (EU) ranks before FDI from North America (NA) in some of the Latin American countries. We investigate the impact of EU- versus NA-FDI on the growth rate including about 50 controls. Country specific effects and parameter heterogeneity are incorporated in our...

We develop a theoretical model of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) to analyze their effects on firm profits and government welfare with heterogeneous firms. We explicitly model the trade-off between attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) and protecting the government's scope to regulate....

This paper scrutinizes the effects of investor-state dispute settlements (ISDS) and national treatment provisions in a two-period model where foreign investment is subject to domestic regulation and a holdup problem. It shows that ISDS can mitigate the holdup problem and increases aggregate...

This paper examines the long-run effect of the level of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the level of total factor productivity (TFP) for 70 developing countries for the period 1981-2011 using panel cointegration techniques. It is found that (i) FDI has, on average, a negative long-run effect...

We examine the impact that financial development had on earnings inequality in Brazil in the 1980's and 90's. The empirical evidence, based on panel time series and time series data, shows that more broad access to financial and credit markets had a significant and robust effect in reducing...

Trade-related characteristics have only been recently started to be included in empirical studies analysing the determinants of the financial constraints faced by firms. A result broadly shared by these studies is that exporting firms tend to be those less financially constrained. In this paper...

In many developing countries, there does not exist a time series of nationally representative household budget or income surveys, while there often are surveys of regions as well as nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) which lack information on incomes. This makes an...

We examine the impact of inflation on financial development in Brazil and the data available permit us to cover the period between 1985 and 2002. The results?based initially on time-series and then on panel time-series data and analysis, and robust for different estimators and financial...

We test for the populist view of inflation in Latin America between 1970 and 2007. The empirical results - based on the relatively novel panel time-series data and analysis - confirm the theoretical prediction that recently elected governments coming into power after periods of political...

In this paper we investigate the role of financial development, or more widespread access to all sorts of finance, in generating economic growth in four Latin American countries between 1980 and 2007. The results, based on panel time-series data and analysis, confirm the Schumpeterian prediction...