Foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers in both developed and developing countries alike. Although a number of studies have documented and some attempted to explain this stylized fact, the issue still remains unresolved. In a multi-period bargaining framework we show that if firm specific training i...

Do tougher environmental regulations cause firms to flee the country? Although several studies document the impact of environmental regulation on domestic production, the question of whether firms increase foreign manufacturing in response to new domestic regulation has remained unanswered. Consequently, our understanding of the efficacy of environmental policy is limited, as is our understandi...

This paper investigates the effects of family ownership on export using rich data on Italian firms. We find that family ownership increases the probability that firms export. This benefit is especially pronounced when family owners retain control rights and seek the support of external managers. The results suggest that families better internalize the long-run benefits of internationalization, ...

This study examines the influence of key corporate governance factors on the internationalization decisions of emerging economy (EE) firms. By integrating the resource-based view and agency theory, it investigates the effects of controlling owner identity, non-controlling shareholder ownership, and the interactions of these with CEO power, in order to reveal their individual and joint effects o...

This paper examines the effect of foreign trade induced product market competition, upon workplace gender discrimination in urban Mexico as measured by the gender earnings differential. More than four decades ago, Becker argued that labour market discrimination was economically inefficient in that discriminating firms must forego a quantity of profit. Thus, firms with more market power, i.e., f...

We investigate whether productivity differences explain why some manufacturers sell only to the domestic market while others serve foreign markets through exports and/or FDI. When overseas production offers no cost advantages, our model predicts that investors should be more productive than exporters. An extension allowing for low-cost foreign production can reverse this prediction. Data for 10...

I propose a model of production and financing for firms in an open economy, which features financial frictions and imperfect competition in the domestic goods market. The optimal currency composition of debt comes from the motive to hedge currency exposure, which arises from the industry equilibrium in the domestic goods market. Using a panel dataset of traded Mexican firms, I find evidence tha...

This paper studies how foreign direct investment (FDI) contributes to cultural convergence across countries. Specifically, we examine whether multinational firms transfer corporate culture of employing women to foreign affi liates and eventually to local firms in the host country. To guide our empirical analysis, we build a parsimonious multi-sector task-based model that features heterogeneity ...

This paper theoretically investigates whether improved access to the domestic market speeds up new technology adoption by a foreign firm adopts new technology. In our model, foreign firms choose between exporting and foreign direct investment (FDI) to serve the domestic market. In the absence of other foreign firms, a reduction in the fixed cost of FDI promotes and accelerates technology adopti...

Recent studies find that China exported goods of relatively high product sophistication, which are not compatible to China’s economic development level. In this paper we use detailed product-level and firm-level data to examine the determination of product sophistication level of Chinese exports in the period 1998-2005, in particular the role of foreign firms. In our study we distinguish betwee...