In this paper we develop a model to analyze the effects of (country-pair-specific) costs of creating, transferring and accessing intangible assets for multi-unit firms. These costs might vary with the cultural distance between countries, such as the difference in language, work ethics or other...

Since innovative firms are often financially constrained, access to external funds is important for the expansion of innovative industries. This paper reports four important results. First, comparative advantage is shaped by factor endowments as well as fundamental determinants of corporate...

The paper empirically analyzes whether electoral rules make legislators differently responsive to changes in fiscal incentives. Key to the analysis are two unique reforms in the German state of Lower Saxony which changed (i) the municipal charter by replacing the council-manager system...

This paper provides a theory of incorporation and taxation that emphasizes the role of the corporate legal form in facilitating access to external capital and the potential advantages of limited liability. Incorporation relaxes financing constraints and makes corporations larger than comparable...

This paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade from switching among three types of de-facto exchange rate regimes: freely floating, currency bands, and pegs or currency unions. A cottage literature at the interface of macroeconomics and international economics focuses...

Profit taxes are widely acknowledged to influence the location of firms' headquarters. This paper sheds light on the role of aspects of labor taxation for the international location of headquarters. We construct a unique data set of effective labor taxes in 120 countries and use data on the...

We use firm-level data for 15 countries and 13 manufacturing sectors to estimate firm-level productivity parameters and to establish representative country-sector-specific empirical productivity distributions. We use these distributions against the backdrop of multi-sector versions of the models...

Earlier work established the notion that international terrorism harms international trade. This evidence was based on annual data with responses in the same year as attacks and incidents and on empirical models which ignored general equilibrium effects. We provide evidence that, if at all,...

Conventional wisdom has it that proportional representation leads to more coalition governments and so to greater government spending, especially in redistributive categories favoured by special-interest groups. In contrast, we show in a theoretical model that first-past-the-post systems of...

Most applied work in international economics treats trade policy (a) as a linear component of trade costs and (b) as an exogenous variable. This paper proposes a structural modelling approach that allows for the estimation of (possibly) non-parametric effects of trade policy using a propensity...