U.S.-owned manufacturing affiliates in foreign countries tended to become more export-oriented between 1966 and 1977. The shift toward exporting characterized affiliates in most industries and most countries.The bulk of U.S.-owned production abroad continues to be for local sale in most...

Many employers link wages at the firm's establishments outside of the home region to the level at headquarters. Multinationals that anchor-to-the headquarters also transmit wage changes arising from shocks to minimum wages and exchange rates in the home country/state to their foreign...

This paper provides a general and unified framework to study the role of production networks in international GDP comovement. We first derive an additive decomposition of bilateral GDP comovement into components capturing shock transmission and shock correlation. We quantify this decomposition...

Global firms finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, often shell companies in tax havens, which obscures their nationality in aggregate statistics. We associate the universe of traded securities with their issuer's ultimate parent and restate bilateral investment positions to better...

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidize the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerable variation in joining among...

The explosion of multinational activities in recent decades is rapidly transforming the global landscape of industrial production. But are the emerging clusters of multinational production the rule or the exception? What drives the offshore agglomeration of multinational firms in comparison to...

We argue that social capital as proxied by regional trust and the Rule of Law can improve aggregate productivity through facilitating greater firm decentralization. We collect original data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production and sales decisions from Corporate Head Quarters...

As production comes to depend more on intangible productive assets, the location of production by multinational firms becomes increasingly ambiguous. The reason is that, within the firm, these assets have no clear geographical location, but only a nominal location determined by the firm's tax or...

Countries that are more engaged in production sharing exhibit higher bilateral manufacturing output correlations. We use data on trade flows between US multinationals and their affiliates as well as trade between the United States and Mexican maquiladoras to measure production-sharing trade and...

We use a new firm level data set that establishes the location, ownership, and activity of 650,000 multinational subsidiaries -- close to a comprehensive picture of global multinational activity. A number of patterns emerge from the data. Most foreign direct investment (FDI) occurs between rich...