Tax incentives offered to attract firms engaged in foreign direct investment are often tied to performance requirements such as domestic content restrictions. The tax competition literature has repeatedly shown that competition between municipalities for mobile firms tends to drive taxes to low levels. One would expect a comparable result for burdensome performance requirements. Despite this, t...

In this paper we analyze a country’s optimal trade policy when its labor market is unionized and firms are footloose. We show that an important objective for governments to use import protection is to prevent their domestic multinationals to go to a non-unionized location abroad and to serve their country from a distance. A domestic government will set a positive tariff to dissuade its multinat...

This paper analyses the determinants of trade patterns between the CEECs and the OECD countries since the latter began their processes of transition and opening-up within the framework of the Association Agreements with the EU, with the ultimate aim of helping to anticipate the trade impact of their accession to the EU. To this end, we estimate an empirical model for a set of countries formed b...

The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as "black boxes", despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these agreements. We overcome this serious limitation by analyzing the impact of modalities on the admissi...

This study seeks to explain why, in some cases, locationally advantageous countries attract foreign firms, who develop dominant competitive positions in the market, rather than facilitate the development of internationally competitive national firms, as theory suggests. Comparative analyses of samples of foreign and British-owned insurance firms in the London wholesale insurance market are used...

This paper investigates the two-way relationship between R&D and export activity. In particular, we concern ourselves with the question whether R&D stimulates exports and, perhaps more importantly, whether export activity leads to increasing innovative activity in terms of R&D (learning by exporting). We use two unique firm level databases for Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland and compa...

Foreign Ownership, Employment and Wages in Brazil: Evidence from Acquisitions, Divestments and Job Movers How much do developing countries benefit from foreign investment? We contribute to this question by comparing the employment and wage practices of foreign and domestic firms in Brazil, using detailed matched firm-worker panel data. In order to control for unobserved worker differences, we e...

We survey an emerging literature at the intersection of organizational economics and international trade. We argue that a proper modelling of the organizational aspects of production provides valuable insights on the aggregate workings of the world economy. In reviewing the literature, we describe certain predictions of standard models that are a¤ected or even overturned when organizational dec...

This paper develops a model of FDI with reverse imports examining the impact of FDI on the home economy through the “hollowing out” effect on the domestic employment. A foreign wage threshold exists. If the foreign wage is lower than the threshold, the home firm chooses FDI. The threshold depends on a FDI fixed cost and a demand parameter. A welfare analysis shows that another foreign wage thre...

The human innate immune system can detect invasion by microbial pathogens through pattern-recognition receptors that recognize structurally conserved pathogen-associated molecular patterns. Retinoic acid-inducible gene I (RIG-I)-like helicases (RLHs) are one of the two major families of pattern-recognition receptors that can detect viral RNA. RIG-I, belonging to the RLH family, is capable of re...