The paper investigates how barter can be used to finance imports and restore the creditworthiness of highly indebted countries when reputation as an enforcement mechanism for credit repayment does not work. The authors argue that payments in goods can be used to collateralize a trade credit and...

The paper compares the two standard forms of international investment in developing countries, debt and foreign direct investment (FDI), from a finance perspective. The sovereign risks associated with debt finance are shown to be generally less severe than the ones that come with FDI. FDI is...

We develop a model of a multinational firm serving a foreign market that needs to decide about the location of production and the optimal ownership structure. We study how the location decision and the ownership choice interact, how these decisions are affected by (cultural) distance and how...

We analyze explicit and implicit contracts in a repeated principal-agent model with observable but only partially contractable actions of the agent. It is shown that the set of implementable actions may increase or decrease if additional actions become contractable.

Low productivity is an important barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. But firms may also need external finance to shoulder the costs of entering foreign markets. We develop a model of multinational firms facing real and financial barriers to foreign direct investment (FDI), and we...

The paper analyses the choice of a raider between a hostile and a friendly takeover. If the target company’s manager has private information about the scope for efficiency gains, it is shown that the raider may prefer a hostile acquisition even if transaction costs for a friendly takeover are...

This paper studies the importance of incentives as a determinant of international trade flows. We argue that barter, countertrade and foreign direct investment can be seen as efficient institutions that mitigate contractual hazards which arise in technology trade, marketing and imperfect capital...

Since the fall of communism, the former Soviet Union experienced a strong output decline and a dramatic increase in arrears and barter. We develop a model which explains how these three phenomena are connected. We introduce liquidity and credit constraints into a model of disorganization and...