This paper uses a proportional hazard model to study foreign direct investment by Japanese manufacturers in Europe between 1970 and 1994. We divide each firm's investment total into a sequence of individual investment decisions and analyze how firm-specific characteristics affect each decision....

This paper studies why multinational firms often share ownership of a foreign affiliate with a local partner even in the absence of government restrictions on ownership. We show that shared ownership may arise, if (i) the partner owns assets that are potentially important for the investment...

This paper examines the link between a firm’s ownership of productive assets and its choice of foreign-market entry strategy. We find that, controlling for industry- and country-specific characteristics, the most productive firms (i.e., those owning the most assets) will enter through...

We provide firm-level evidence concerning four key facts of services trade in Germany. First, not only firms classified as service firms, but also firms from all industries export and import services. Second, service trade patterns are fairly similar to those in goods trade. Most notably,...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. We find that the distributions for multinationals dominate...

This paper examines the link between a firm’s owership of productive assets and its choice of foreign-market entry strategy. We find that, controlling for industry- and country-specific characteristics, the most productive firms (i.e., those owning the most assets) will enter through...

We use Japanese microdata to examine how financial market frictions affect foreign direct investment (FDI). The Japanese land price bubble and banking trouble in the late 1980s and early 1990s serve as a quasi natural experiment to identify two possible transmission channels from financial...