Local sourcing from indigenous firms by multinational enterprises (MNEs) is an important channel through which the former may benefit from the positive externalities generated by the latter. Employing a special survey data set covering 493 multinational subsidiaries in China for the period 1999-2005, this paper investigates the determinants of local sourcing. It is found that the extent to whic...

Ž . The paper uses new cross-country data on income and asset land distribution to show Ž . that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset Ž . distribution and long-term growth; ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor, but Ž . not for the rich; and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the Kuznets hypothesis. Policies that in...

This paper explores the potential of microfinance in post-conflict economies, and specifically examines policy considerations for the case of Iraq. It presents important conditions of the post-conflict economy, and examines three critical requirements for successful microfinance operations, as outlined by the Microenterprises Best Practices Project. Political stability, economic demand and popu...

This paper develops a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms to study the interaction between technology adoption and trade in a world of two countries facing different technology adoption costs. It shows that a reduction in the technology adoption cost in one country increases the productivity, induces more firms to adopt advanced technology, and improves welfare in this count...

Governments often promote inward foreign investment to encourage technology “spillovers” from foreign to domestic firms. Using panel data on Venezuelan plants, we find that foreign equity participation is positively correlated with plant productivity (the “own-plant” effect), but this relationship is only robust for small enterprises. We then test for spillovers from joint ventures to plants wi...

Whether diversity or specialization of economic activity better promotes technological change and subsequent economic growth has been the subject of a heated debate in the economics literature. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of the composition of economic activity on innovation. We test whether the specialization of economic activity within a narrow concentrated set of econ...

This paper develops an asymmetric information model that provides an economic rational for co-signing. It is shown that banks can solve adverse selection problems by offering a co-signing contract that induces a risky and a safe firm to group together. The equilibrium co-signing debt contract strictly Pareto dominates an equilibrium without a co-signer if the latter entails rationing. The debt ...

There has long been a minority view that providing people with cash is an effective way of combating poverty and economic insecurity while promoting livelihoods and work. The mainstream view has been that giving people money, without conditions or obligations, promotes idleness and dependency, while being unnecessarily costly. Better, they contend, would be to allocate the available money to sc...

This paper examines the development of legal contract enforcement in a political economy context. The key insight is that, in earlier times when relational contracts are used predominantly, the rich elite agents must have enjoyed comparative advantages in using relational contracts than the poor and thus would bene…t less from investing in legal enforcement. The paper …nds that high income ineq...

This study validates a survey-based measure of general risk attitude by an incentive compatible experiment among more than 900 participants in rural Thailand. The survey measure of self-assessed risk attitude provides a useful approximation of the experimentally derived risk attitude. This holds when we add various socio-demographic control variables to the survey-experiment-relation which are ...