The issue of corruption is important to politicians, citizens, and firms. Since the early 1990s, a large number of studies have sought to understand the causes and consequences of corruption employing firm-level survey data from various countries. While insightful, these analyses have largely...

Both countries and subnational governments commonly engage in competition for mobile capital, offering generous location incentives to attract investment. The use of tax incentives is a paradox, whereby fiscally strained governments offer lucrative tax treatment to firms, yet the economics...

Despite broad skepticism about the benefits of globalization, the majority of U.S. states have offered lucrative tax incentives to attract investment. The size of these incentives is generally considered too large to be welfare enhancing, and many economists are skeptical of the effectiveness of...

The global financial crisis has increased pressures on governments to pursue wide-ranging banking reform, highlighting the importance of domestic responses to globalization. In this paper, we study mass policy preferences on banking reform as well as the change of those preferences in response...

Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that this theory is too broad-brush and that the empirical work testing it is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total...

A strong statistical association between legislative opposition in authoritarian regimes and investment has been interpreted as evidence that authoritarian legislatures constrain executive decisions and reduce the threat of expropriation. Although the empirical relationship is robust, scholars...

Many scholars argue that international institutions have little power to enforce laws, punish offenders, or force compliance. Others stress that international institutions are important actors, specifically in the regulation of international trade. In this paper I argue that the recent trade...

There is a renewed interest in how political risk affects multinational corporations operating in emerging markets. Much of this research has focused on the relationship between democratic institutions and flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), offering inconclusive evidence on the...

In this paper we explore the relationship between the investments of multinational corporations (foreign direct investment) and income inequality in Mexico. We argue that Mexico's liberalization of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows in the 1990s provides a natural experiment to test how FDI...

In late 2008, as financial markets were crashing, the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment launched the Columbia FDI Perspectives. The first Perspective, entitled “The FDI recession has begun,” correctly forecast an FDI recession in the following year. From that first...