We provide evidence that deterioration of relations between the United States and another country, measured by divergence in their UN General Assembly voting patterns, reduces US imports from that country during the second wave of globalization. Though statistically significant, such an effect...

Foreign-owned firms from advanced countries carry the culture of transparency in business transactions that is orthogonal to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in many developing economies and economies in transition. In this paper, we document this using administrative data on reported...

Using a framework akin to portfolio theory in asset pricing, we introduce the concept of “political beta” to model firm-level export diversification in response to global political risk. The main implication of our model is that a firm is less responsive to changes in political relations...

It is commonly believed that taxation of physical capital is quot;a bad ideaquot;. Whereas in reality many countries do levy heavy taxes on capital income. In this paper we show that taxation of physical capital can be justified when there is non-convexity of technology due to human capital...

We utilize high-frequency data to study heterogeneity in access to bank-level information by corporate depositors during a banking crisis. We examine a bank panic episode in Russia during Summer-2004 triggered by the Central Bank announcement to liquidate banks for suspicious operations. Our...

We use mandatory Russian banks' reports to the Central Bank to construct a novel measure of offshore-banking. Individual bank involvement in offshore operations is calculated as a fraction of total transactions with foreign countries that go through offshore financial centers. We find that...

Does China’s quest for oil raise tensions with the United States? This paper examines the effect of international relations on global oil trade patterns. Using voting records for the United Nations General Assembly to measure the state of international relations, we estimate a modified gravity...