Foreign direct investment (FDI) brings host countries capital, productive facilities, and technology transfers, as well as new jobs and management expertise. Thus, it is important to understand the basic reasons for FDI inflow and make clear what gains from FDI are. In the present paper, based on theoretical findings we formulate clear message stating that inflow of FDI does not need to be expl...

On 1 January 2007, Slovenia was the first new EU member state to enter the euro area. Since June 2004, the Slovenian tolar participated in the exchange rate mechanism ERM-II with a central parity of 239.64 against the euro. This parity was also the conversion rate upon euro area accession. Applying a macroeconometric model of Slovenia, this paper analyses the macroeconomic effects of different ...

This paper explores the paradox that the EU invests significant effort into including regulatory issues into Free Trade Agreements with apparently little binding impact other than in the case of prospective candidate countries who are likely to become members of the EU. The explanation does not appear to be pressure from the EU for binding agreements that is resisted by developing country partn...

We examine the effect of financial integration on capital stocks and income per capita, explicitly taking into account the division of output between tradable and non-tradable goods. Capital per worker in a financially integrated country is shown to depend on the size and relative capital-intensity of the tradable sector. Using a panel of 67 countries over the period 1976-1999, we show a weakly...

Focusing on the global trading relationship aggregated at the level of 15 regions and 10 sectors, we investigate in this paper the welfare effects of preferential trade liberalisation in South Asia from several simulation perspectives. The static version of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model shows that countries that are initially more protected (such as India) are likely to capture...

We examine in detail the circumstances under which reciprocity, as defined in Bagwell and Staiger (1999), leads to fixed world prices. We show that a change of tariffs satisfying reciprocity does not necessarily imply constant world prices in a world of many goods and countries. While it is possible to find tariff reforms that are consistent with both reciprocity and constant world prices (as B...

This paper implements a fair wage constraint in the fashion of Akerlof and Yellen (1990) into an analytically tractable core-periphery agglomeration model. This enables us to study the role of imperfect labour markets for the pattern of agglomeration. We illustrate that, in the short run, a marginal increase in fair wage preferences leads to an unambiguous compression of the national factor pri...

We provide evidence on the impact of globalization on labor market outcomes analyzing pay differences between foreign-acquired and domestically-owned firms. For this purpose, we use firm level data from 16 European countries over the time period 1999–2006. Applying propensity score matching techniques we estimate positive wage premia of cross-boarder merger and acquisitions (M&As), suggesting t...

This paper introduces service innovation in the proximity-concentration trade-off model of trade and FDI (Helpman, Melitz and Yeaple, 2004). The idea is that innovation will have two main effects on service firms’ choice between exports and FDI. First, innovative firms will on average have higher productivity levels than non-innovative enterprises. Secondly, innovators will have to pay a higher...

This paper provides a set of empirical tests of the cross-sectional variation of stock volatility and investablility, where investability is defined as the degree to which a stock is accessible to foreigners. Unlike previous studies, which focus on market volatility and market return, we study the relationship between individual stock return volatility and its investablility. Our findings have ...