Large-scale land acquisitions, or "land grabs", concentrate in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendly setting caused by a weak institutional framework. We argue that corrupt elites exploit this given institutional set-up to strike deals with international...

Large-scale land acquisitions often take place in developing countries which are also known for their corruption-friendliness caused by weak institutional frameworks. We hypothesize that corruption indeed leads to more land deals. We argue that corrupt elites exploit poor institutional setups...

Political economy accounts of economic integration strongly emphasize the importance of legal contract enforcement. We challenge extant research by showing that relational contracting, relationship-based contract enforcement, is more efficient for high-risk, human capital-intensive activities...

The paper provides a cross-country empirical analysis of the impact of corruption on foreign direct investment flows. The gravity model estimates suggest that if control of corruption in the destination country improves, investment flows from cleaner countries rise more than they do from...

This study investigates the effects of institutional quality, inward FDI, trade openness, and their interaction on the domestic credit equilibrium in 33 emerging economies between 2002 and 2015. Through two system-GMM estimators, our study shows that inward FDIs have a booming effect on the...

Capital importing countries use bilateral investment treaties (BITs) as a means to attract foreign investors who see in these investment agreements an effective tool to employ in case of potential investment disputes. Several countries, often at the expense of their sovereign rights, have...