This article highlights current economic conditions in China and analyzes existing obstacles to improving workplace conditions and labor practices. There are significant disincentives to strengthening workplace protections, and downward pressures are currently worsening conditions in a number of economic sectors. However, there are also potential strategies for motivating multinational corporat...

Around the world, policymakers are obsessed with the competitiveness of their domestic companies and domestically based multinational corporations (MNCs). Such concerns frequently influence policy, especially tax policy. In this paper, I develop a theory of how taxes affect the international competitiveness of businesses. I then use that theory to evaluate basic tax policy decisions, such as th...

Research on multinational corporations (MNCs) and host government political risk in developing countries has largely ignored local electoral politics, economic policies, and the MNC investment incentives they may generate. In response, I develop and test a framework for understanding MNC risk and investment behavior based on political business cycle considerations. Analyses of 408 MNC investmen...

This paper examines how multinational corporations (MNCs) protect their research and development (R&D) activities that are conducted in weak intellectual property rights (IPR) regime countries. Findings from a small scale survey and three case studies in China show that hierarchical segmentation of R&D process can be an effective way for MNC R&D labs to protect their intellectual property. Furt...

Why Corporate Taxes May Rise: The Case of Trade Liberalization and Foreign Ownership* Almost all the literature on tax competition in the presence of multinationals (MNCs) and profit shifting ignores trade costs. This Paper studies how economic integration, in terms of reduced trade costs and internationalization of ownership, affects tax competition and equilibrium corporate taxes. We find tha...

FDI has received surprisingly little attention in theoretical and empirical work on openness and growth. This paper presents a theoretical growth model where MNCs directly affect the endogenous growth rate via technological spillovers. This is novel since other endogenous growth models with MNCs, e.g. the Grossman-Helpman model, assume away the knowledge-spillovers aspect of FDI. We also presen...

In a recent global competitiveness report by the IMF, the four Nordic countries all ranked in top ten, attesting to the region’s growing attractiveness as a host location for MNCs. This paper investigates the driving forces determining foreign direct investment flows into Scandinavia. We use a panel data set covering FDI inflows to Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland for the period 1979-2000. R...