This paper investigates the effect of firms’ working capital management, measured by the cash conversion cycle (CCC) on exports, on both the intensive and extensive margins. By using Heckman’s two-stage model for the treatment of sample selection bias, we find that the longer the CCC, the lower firms’ likelihood of exporting and the lower the volume of their exports. This phenomenon is economically more relevant for financially constrained firms than for unconstrained firms. The results are robust to the propensity score matching, the transition sample and the placebo analyses. Finally, these results can be extrapolated in the context of the COVID-19 crisis because of the decline in trading conditions and firms’ shortage of liquidity.

We test whether sunk exporting costs differ among markets. Our results confirm that during 1990–2002, sunk exporting costs were relevant for Spanish firms, and differed depending on the destination market. Besides, the costs to enter/re-enter were higher in developed markets.

In this article, we investigate the determinants of individuals’ opinions concerning the economic impact of immigrants. Unlike most previous studies, we use a large sample of 61 countries (Joint WVS/EVS 2017–2020 dataset) that are either net receivers or net emitters of migrants. Using a multilevel model, we test the effect of individuals’ characteristics and of several macroeconomic variables on the assessment of immigrants’ impact on development. We highlight that natives’ evaluation of the economic consequences of immigration is more influenced by age, trust, education, and income than by contextual variables such as growth, inflation, inequalities, income level, or number of immigrants in the country. Our results match with the hypothesis that immigrants are considered substitutes for low- and medium-skilled workers in capital-abundant countries. However, neither labour-market nor welfare-state considerations can be considered as the main drivers of the appraisals made about the economic impact of immigration. Our results tend to confirm the prediction that greater contact with immigrants reduces anti-immigrant opinions, in particular for skilled people. In contrast, immigrant inflows lead low- and medium-skilled people to make worse judgments concerning the economic consequences of immigration. All in all, our results validate the view that education comprises a major part of the cognitive assessment of the role played by immigrants in the economy, at least in high-income countries.

This study delves into the relationship between income inequality and subjective well-being by gauging the role played by opportunities at the country level. Using data from the World Value Survey, we estimate multilevel models to explain cross-country differences in individuals’ life satisfaction. Opportunity and inequality exert a significant effect per se on life satisfaction, and their joint effect explains the puzzling positive relationship between income inequality and life satisfaction in low- and middle-income countries. Income inequalities reduce the well-being of individuals if opportunities are low, but inequality is not relevant for life satisfaction if opportunities in the country are high. Among the aspects of opportunity that really matter, we show that inclusiveness and access to advanced education play a more major role than political freedom or personal rights. Results apply for different social, income, and education groups.

This work assesses the impact of terrorism suffered by a country on the capacity to attract foreign greenfield investments. To this end, we estimate a theoretically consistent structural gravity equation which accounts for several well-known estimation biases such as ‘home bias’, endogeneity and multilateral resistance. This specification makes it possible to identify the effect of a country-specific time-varying characteristic such as terrorism on bilateral foreign direct investment. We exploit a dataset that covers domestic and foreign investment of 182 countries in the period 2006-2016 on both the extensive and intensive margins. Our study finds that foreign investors are reluctant to invest in countries affected by terrorism and also reduce the amount of their investments in such cases. Sensitivity to terrorism is higher for foreign than for domestic investors. Terrorist attacks have a more intense impact on foreign investors’ decision-making when they are international or when these violent acts hurt governments. However, our results also evidence that good governance appears to be an effective tool for counterbalancing these damages in the eyes of foreign investors.