Convergence in per capita income turns on whether technological knowledge spillovers are global or local. Global spillovers favor convergence, while a geographically limited scope of knowledge diffusion can lead to regional clusters of countries with persistently different levels of income per...

We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between the years of 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to substantial productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI...

In what sense are institutions a deep determinant of growth? In this paper, we address this question by examining the relationship between city growth and institutional reform in 19th century Germany, when some cities experienced deep institutional reform as a result of French rule. Employing an...

This paper presents a model of international trade in differentiated intermediate goods. Because intermediates are invented through costly R&D investments, employing foreign intermediates implies sharing the return to R&D with the inventor country. We first derive how domestic productivity is...

This paper shows that globalization has far-reaching implications for the economy’s fertility rate and family structure because it influences work-life balance. Employing population register data on all births, marriages, and divorces together with employer-employee linked data for Denmark, we...

This paper studies international joint ventures, where foreign direct investment is performed by a foreign and a domestic firm that together set up a new firm, the joint venture. Employing administrative data on all international joint ventures in China from 1998 to 2007—roughly a quarter of...

China’s recent growth of trade and income is routinely characterized as staggering and the like. We zoom in on Shanghai to see which part is hyperbole and which is not taking the long view. The city is ideal for this‐‐Shanghai held more than half of China’s foreign trade in 1850 and is...