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...

This paper puts forward a Bayesian version of the global vector autoregressive model (B-GVAR) that accommodates international linkages across countries in a system of vec- tor autoregressions. We compare the predictive performance of B-GVAR models for the one- and four-quarter ahead forecast...

People?s quality of life in specific places is affected by their territories? characteristics and local agents? actions and interactions, as well as their responses to external influences. Formal and informal institutions contribute to shape those actions, interactions and responses. Following...

The spatial agglomeration of economic activities play a crucial role on productivity but the composition of such an agglomeration is what really matters. There exists an ongoing debate between the predominance of the effects of agglomeration from specialization and diversity. This paper aims to...

Theoretical approaches have been developed to examine the effect of agglomeration on growth. However, the understanding of the mechanisms of agglomeration in developing countries remains unaddressed. This paper aims to give empirical evidence of the role of agglomeration on the growth of Latin...

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...