Only a few years ago the widely shared view was that low food prices were a curse to developing countries and the poor. The dramatic increase of food prices in 2006-2008 appears to have fundamentally altered this view. The vast majority of analyses and reports in 2008 and 2009 state that high...

Many firms cite financial constraints as some of the most important impediments to their investment and growth. Using a unique data set from the Czech Republic this paper investigates the importance of financing constraints in the context of exporters. It finds that exporters are less...

Many contributions to the literature on competition in banking use the Panzar and Rosse test (1987). This test encompasses a variety of market outcomes assuming firms maximize profits. However, when applied to the banking industry, this assumption may not be always valid as banks sometimes may...

This paper develops a formal theory of the endogenous process of the introduction of high quality products in developing countries. Initial differences in income and capital and transaction costs are shown to affect the emergence of and the size of the high quality economy. Initial differences...

Many countries strive to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) hoping that knowledge brought by multinationals will spill over to domestic industries and increase their productivity. While the empirical studies have cast doubt on the existence of horizontal spillovers from FDI in developing...

We use Belgian rm-level data over the period 1996-2007 to analyze the impact of im- ports from China and other low-wage countries on rm growth, exit, and skill upgrading in manufacturing. For this purpose we use both industry-level and rm-level imports by country of origin and distinguish...

This paper empirically evaluates the effects of antidumping measures on the exports of protected firms. While antidumping protection raises the domestic sales of the more "traditional?non-exporting firms on the protected market with about 5%, it negatively affects the firm-level exports of...

This paper uses firm level data to show how R&D investment responds to shocks in sales growth in credit constrained firms. A credit constrained firm has to rely on its cash flow and borrowing capacity to survive its short-run liquidity shock when hit by a negative shock. This reduces the...

This paper analyzes the drivers of multinational affiliates' R&D intensity, using a unique dataset based on the fourth Community Innovation Survey for Belgium. Specifically, we investigate the role of foreign affiliates' local (host country) embeddedness and of host country spillovers on foreign...

This paper investigates how the choice of public expenditure instrument is affecting capture in the public education sector. We analyze data on two public funding schemes in Madagascar. We find that there is much more capture of in-kind transfers than of cash transfers. Capture of both...