It is often argued that additional constraints on redistribution such as granting veto power to more players in the society makes property better protected from expropriation. We use a legislative bargainingtype model to demonstrate that this intuition may be flawed. Increasing the number of veto players or raising the supermajority requirement for redistribution may reduce protection on the eq...

This paper evaluates the importance of “property rights institutions”, which protect citizens against expropriation by the government and powerful elites, and “contracting institutions”, which enable private contracts between citizens. We exploit exogenous variation in both types of institutions driven by colonial history, and document strong firststage relationships between property rights ins...

Following the notion of skill-biased FDI fl ows from developed to less developed regions, high-skilled workers are likely to benefi t from FDI to a larger extent. They earn a productivity advantage that potentially transfers into a skilled wage premium. This gives rise to distributional confl ict that might turn into heterogeneous attitudes toward FDI infl ows in line with skill. In this paper ...

This paper examines conditions under which the agency problem in PPP (expropriation of the private partner by the state) could be rectified. We propose that the issue lies not in a ‘complete contract’ (a more protective ex ante contract) in mitigating the agency problem in PPP, but rather the opposite! A least protective contract (no contract at all), coupled with the dynamics of an optimal “in...

Many U.S. banks have tried to take advantage of and contribute to economic growth in developing countries by establishing branches in foreign nations.' When political and economic conditions become unstable, foreign governments have on occasion expropriated the branches' assets. Depositors unable to withdraw their funds because of the expropriation may attempt to recover from the U.S. bank's ho...

We use China as a laboratory to test the effect of government quality on cash holdings. We build on, and extend, the existing literature on government expropriation and its interaction with firm-level agency problems by proposing a financial constraint mitigation argument. We find that firms hold less cash when local government quality is high, which is not consistent with the state expropriati...

Following the notion of skill-biased FDI fl ows from developed to less developed regions, high-skilled workers are likely to benefi t from FDI to a larger extent. They earn a productivity advantage that potentially transfers into a skilled wage premium. This gives rise to distributional confl ict that might turn into heterogeneous attitudes toward FDI infl ows in line with skill. In this paper ...

There are no laws preventing a host government from seizing the capital of a foreign direct investment in its borders and then denying any compensation for the foreign investor. Why then do we not see many more expropriations of investor capital by host governments? Compiling a database of expropriations within the minerals sectors of developing countries, we show that there is punishment for e...

Despite the prevalence and economic importance of the family-owned firms and group -affiliated firms in north America, Western Europe and East-Asia, little attention, if any, has been given to these types of organizations in finance. Using parametric and non parametric tests on a sample of Canadian listed firms, this paper provided empirical evidence of sharp contrast in financial features and ...