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Building on the institutional economics perspective, we study how local firms in an emerging economy exploit institutional voids by sourcing inputs from industries with a large informal economy. We argue that this allows them to build a cost-related competitive advantage and leverage it both to export and to enhance export performance. The empirical study uses a unique dataset compiled by the Mexican authorities covering manufacturing plants between 2005 and 2012. Our results indicate that firms operating in industries that procure from industries with an extensive informal economy are more likely to export and to have better export performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across global cities of the world, urban spaces of arrival tend to be characterized by a multiplicity of informal practices, and therefore also marginality, being most prevalent in relation to local economic practices, and increasingly more the legal status of foreigner migrants residing in such spaces. This article aims to understand these dynamics in arrival spaces at the margins by exploring both domains in a unique manner. Over recent decades, urban and migration studies have separately given rise to new research that is critical of the pervasive binary views around formal versus informal economies and legal versus illegal migrations. Drawing on this literature, and ethnographic fieldwork carried out in an Istanbul locality that has served as a zone of arrival for varying migration flows over several decades, this article examines how both business proprietors and migrants working and/or residing in the locality actively and continuously re-negotiate their positions within spectrums of in/formality and il/legality. It shows that arrival spaces at the margins are places of intense calculation and that the chosen direction along these spectrums depends on an evaluation of all kinds of social, political, spatial, and temporal factors transpiring at a particular moment and place. In focusing on this processual nature of in/formalities and il/legalities, the article also suggests reconsidering various other dualities, including margins versus center, exclusion versus inclusion, and arrival versus settlement, and argues that the intensity of having to manage one's experiences of these dualities is what really distinguishes inhabiting arrival spaces at the margins in today's global cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trading relations in Vietnam's emerging private sector are shaped by two market frictions: the difficulty of locating trading partners and the absence of legal enforcement of contracts. Examining relational contracting, we find that a firm trusts its customer enough to offer credit when the customer finds it hard to locate an alternative supplier. A longer duration of trading relationship is associated with larger credit, as is prior information gathering. Customers identified through business networks receive more credit. These network effects are enduring, suggesting that networks are used to sanction defaulting customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]