This paper studies bilateral cultural preferences as an asymmetric dimension of cultural proximity and estimates their effect on greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI). We derive a gravity equation of FDI and test simultaneously the impact of both (a) the preferences of investing countries...

Recent theoretical work on international trade emphasizes the importance of trade elasticity as the fundamental statistic needed to conduct welfare analysis. Eaton and Kortum (2002) proposed a two-step method to estimate this parameter, where exporter fixed effects are regressed on proxies for...

Since policymakers increasingly regard foreign aid as a means to manage international flows of migrants, it is important to obtain accurate empirical evidence on the complex link between aid and migration. Recent research has shown that the impact of foreign assistance on migrant flows is highly...

This paper investigates the role of cultural proximity (CP) on greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI). We build a conceptual framework that explicitly accounts for the asymmetric dimensions in the cultural relationship between two countries, and single out a symmetric element (similarity)...

International student flows from emerging and developing countries have grown tremendously over the last decades. In this paper, we address the question of whether donors, who might care about the potential brain drain effects student emigration entails in the countries of origin, can affect the...

Recent years have seen an unprecedented growth and geographic dispersion in international student mobility. In this paper, we empirically test the predictions of two competing theoretical models underpinning the determinants of student mobility – the human capital model and the migration model...

This paper uses geographically disaggregated data to investigate the role of foreign aid as a pull factor for internal migration in Malawi over the period 1998-2008. Employing a standard gravity model of migration, we show a positive relationship between the volume of foreign assistance a...

Debates on the extent to which developing countries suffer from a brain drain often focus on the emigration of locally scarce health personnel. In this paper, we empirically examine how two potential determinants - aid for health and local income levels - affect the emigration rates of doctors...

Recent years have seen an unprecedented growth and geographic dispersion in international student mobility. In this paper, we empirically test the predictions of two competing theoretical models underpinning the determinants of student mobility - the human capital model and the migration model -...