Corruption and assortative matching of partners in international trade

Although the effects of corruption on bilateral trade are well-documented, its impact on the composition of trading partners remains unexplored. In this paper, we argue that corruption in a country imposes asymmetric costs on its trading partners depending on their characteristics. Consequently, as the level of corruption in a country changes, its trade flows from some of its trading partners change more than others, depending on their characteristics, changing the composition of its trading partners. We focus on two characteristics of trading partners: (1) the level of corruption and (2) membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (OECD Convention). Using the gravity model, we find evidence of a negative assortative matching in international trade with respect to corruption. We find that corruption in a country is negatively associated with trade flows from high-corrupt countries and is positively associated with trade volume from signatories of the OECD convention. Our results suggest that future studies on this topic should consider controlling for institutional dissimilarities between the trading partners as it has implications for bilateral trade costs.     

E-commerce in Spain: Determining factors and the importance of the e-trust

This paper identifies and estimates the determinants for participating in e-commerce and developing e-trust, as well as the importance of e-trust for e-commerce in Spain. For its analysis, a national survey from 2014 to 2019 is used and the logit model is implemented. It is concluded that the e-trust is a determining factor in e-commerce, and the improvement of equality education helps the growth of online commerce and e-trust. In turn, e-trust encourages the use of all digital resources.     

Do corporate taxes affect employee welfare? Evidence from workplace safety

We examine the impact of tax policy on worker safety that exploits spatial discontinuity in treatment and control establishments stemming from state-level corporate tax changes. The granularity of our data and econometric approach allows us to exploit within-firm, across-establishment variation in worker safety shedding light on the real effects of headquarter versus plant-level decisions. Plant-level injury rates increase with tax hikes in establishment states, but not with those in headquarter states, highlighting the importance of plant-level decisions. We explore three plausible non-mutually exclusive mechanisms to help explain these findings ─ safety investment, leverage, and labor stress channels. We find that in the presence of a tax hike, firms reduce safety-related investments, and the tax effect on injury rates is exacerbated for firms that increase leverage and for firms where employees work longer hours and seasonal workers are used. Overall, our findings suggest that tax increases lead to negative welfare outcomes for employees, with no similar benefit accruing for tax cuts.