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Brexit means that UK exporters of services now face more red tape and fewer opportunities....Read more...
Danyal Arnold, Shania Bhalotia and Swati Dhingra
21 October 2025
New evidence using geo-referenced data across the African continent suggests that the arrival of multinational enterprises can fuel local conflicts....Read more...
Tommaso Sonno
20 May 2025
Multinational enterprises are at the centre of policy debates in low- and middle-income countries. As some of the most productive and innovative firms in the world, which are at the core of global supply chains, multinat...Read more...
Vanessa Alviarez, Laura Boudreau, Evangelina Dardati, Jingting Fan, Farid Farrokhi, Ezequiel Garcia-Lembergman, Stefania Garetto, Grace Gu, Galina Hale, David Hemous, Nicola Limodio, Pierre Louis Vezina, Isabela Manelici, Ralf Martin, Nicolas Morales, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar, Nina Pavcnik, Heitor Pellegrina, Natalia Ramondo and Jose P Vasquez
12 February 2025
This episode of Development Dialogues addresses how lower-income countries have engaged with global trade. How have their approaches to trade differed based on their underlying institutional and economic structure? What ...Read more...
Amit Khandelwal, Isabela Manelici and Arvind Subramanian
17 December 2024
Aggregate exports are highly concentrated in a small group of firms, which are generally more productive than other firms. This column shows that productivity shocks generate different responses of aggregate exports depe...Read more...
Giorgio Barba Navaretti, Matteo Bugamelli, Emanuele Forlani and Gianmarco Ottaviano
16 December 2024
Developing countries compete to attract multinationals to induce development. Becoming suppliers to multinationals could improve domestic firms' technology and managerial practices, and the host country's economy could b...Read more...
Alonso Alfaro-Urena, Isabela Manelici and Jose P Vasquez
21 November 2023
In 2001, Romania gave an income tax break to a select group of software programmers. Isabela Manelici explains how this particular industrial policy helped stem Romania's "brain drain" problem, transformed the country's ...Read more...
Isabela Manelici
9 July 2023
As Russia's war against Ukraine continues to unfold, its global economic impact remains uncertain. Evidence from the stock market indicates that firms with strong trade or ownership ties to Russia are more likely to face...Read more...
Marcus Biermann and Elsa Leromain
25 May 2023
There is growing pressure on multinational enterprises to implement 'responsible sourcing' requirements for their suppliers in low- and middle-income countries. These include minimum standards on working conditions, such...Read more...
Alonso Alfaro-Urena, Benjamin Faber, Cecile Gaubert, Isabela Manelici and Jose P Vasquez
20 December 2022
Dzhamilya Nigmatulina assesses the impact of sanctions following the 2014 annexation of Crimea on Russian sanctioned firms. The capital, materials inputs, and revenue of sanctioned firms actually increased relative to no...Read more...
Dzhamilya Nigmatulina
19 November 2022
Resource-based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products that use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common-input capabilities, using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...
Johannes Boehm, Swati Dhingra and John Morrow
25 October 2022
Trade in services is important but difficult to measure. This column introduces a new dataset that helps understand the contribution of services to global value chains and their role in the process of exporting goods. Fi...Read more...
Giuseppe Berlingieri, Luca Marcolin and Emanuel Ornelas
28 July 2021
Service inputs are a key component of the costs of exporting, and contribute to explain the process of internationalization of firms. A new dataset on the participation of French firms in global value chains reveals that...Read more...
3 June 2021
This paper analyzes firm boundaries in the US hotel industry. Hotel properties of a given brand are often managed either by a chain employee or by a franchisee. We document that brand properties with the lowest and the h...Read more...
Arturs Kalnins, Stephen F. Lin and Catherine Thomas
1 November 2020
We document how demand shocks in export markets lead French multi-product exporters to re-allocate the mix of products sold in those destinations. In response to positive demand shocks, French firms skew their export sal...Read more...
Thierry Mayer, Marc J. Melitz and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano
1 August 2020
Quantifying the effects of trade policy in the age of ’global value chains’ (GVCs) requires an enhanced analytical framework that takes the observed international input-output relations in due account. However, existing ...Read more...
Rita Cappariello, Sebastian Franco-Bedoya, Vanessa Gunnella and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano
26 March 2020
This paper introduces the concept of intangible assets in a property rights model of sequential supply chains. Firms transmit knowledge to their suppliers to facilitate input customization. Yet, to avoid knowledge dissip...Read more...
Stefano Bolatto, Alireza Naghavi, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Katja Zajc Kejzar
21 January 2020
Resource based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products which use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common input capabilities using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...
17 April 2019
In this paper, we focus on a new channel of adaptation to trade liberalization , namely the shift toward increased provision of services in lieu of goods production. We exploit variation in European Union trade policy to...Read more...
Holger Breinlich, Anson Soderbery and Greg C. Wright
1 November 2018
Direct involvement of global banks in local retail activities can reduce risk-taking by promoting local competition. We develop this argument through a model in which multinational banks operate simultaneously in differe...Read more...
Ester Faia and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano
27 March 2017
Many countries are looking to their export sectors as a source of future growth, but how do domestic companies make a success of selling their output abroad? Research by Emanuel Ornelas and colleagues finds evidence of '...Read more...
Facundo Albornoz, Hector Calvo-Pardo, Gregory Corcos and Emanuel Ornelas
16 February 2012