International Economic Review最新文献

Using comprehensive patent data, we document: (1) multinational affiliates and their foreign parent firms comprise a significant portion of patents filed in China; and (2) there are subsequent transfers and spillovers of these technologies to domestic firms. Guided by this evidence, we develop a model of multinational production featuring cross-country idea flows, transfers, and spillovers. Quantitatively, we find that without multinational production and knowledge spillovers, the idea stock owned by China would drop by 30%. Furthermore, due to the externalities of multinationals through technology transfers and spillovers, subsidizing multinationals will at most increase real income by 8% in China.

This study shows that technological specialization is one plausible driver of long-term international capital flows. Capital scarcity raises marginal returns but also steers countries toward capital-saving technologies. As a result, capital-rich countries adopt capital-complementary technologies and keep importing capital from poorer countries that favor capital-substitute innovations. This divergence force on capital allocation, which we name the capital Matthew effect, offsets convergence from diminishing returns. The mechanism offers a unified explanation for puzzles like the Lucas paradox and global imbalances. Finally, we provide both country-level and firm-level evidence supporting this new model mechanism.

Although extractive industries have been associated with women's empowerment and lower infant mortality in Africa, this article provides evidence that the rapid increase in the demand for lithium-ion batteries reduced the education rates of children living in cobalt mining villages in sub-Saharan Africa. Children exposed to cobalt mining also exhibit slower cognitive and physical development than those living in noncobalt mining communities. The estimates are robust to spatial spillover effects and selective migration. This study highlights the need for policies that enforce child labor regulations in the cobalt mining sector, particularly because cobalt is crucial to technological development. Such policies can help mitigate the negative economic consequences for cobalt-rich communities in the long run.

We provide a New Keynesian model with overlapping generations to study the impact of temporary and permanent increases in fiscal deficits financed by debt rollover policy when interest rates are lower than economic growth rates. The debt rollover policy is feasible in the monetary regime but leads to very slow-moving debt. This policy generates persistent inflation for a temporary increase in fiscal deficits, but persistent disinflation for a permanent increase. For social welfare, the debt rollover policy dominates the conventional fiscal rule to finance a temporary increase in fiscal deficits, but it is dominated if the increase is permanent.

International migration is a selective process with ambiguous effects on human capital and economic development in sending countries. We establish the theoretical microfoundations of the relationship between selective emigration and human capital accumulation in a multicountry context. We embed this migration–education nexus into a development accounting framework to quantify the effects of migration on development and inequality. Selective emigration stimulates human capital accumulation and income in most origin countries. The effect varies according to the level of development, the dyadic structure of migration costs, and education policies. Emigration significantly reduces the number of people living in extreme poverty.

We use financial reforms as a case study to understand the temporal clustering of policy changes across countries, shedding light on the broader phenomenon of global policy contagion. We construct a comprehensive database of domestic financial reforms spanning 90 countries from 1973 to 2014. Using this dataset, we estimate a semistructural model that incorporates key factors identified in the literature. We find that (1) geopolitical influence and cross-country learning drove the global surge in reforms during the 1990s, and (2) reversals of financial reforms in developing countries after the global financial crisis reflected shifting beliefs about their growth effects.