Transferring low tech manufacturing jobs to cheap labour countries is often seen by part of the general public and policy makers as a step into the de-industrialisation of the European economies. However, several recent contributions have shown that the effects on home economies are rarely...

The paper investigates the impact that the multinational scope of firms' activities can have on their productivity. First, we argue that such an impact is both direct and indirect, and that the latter is channelled through higher incentives to invest in R&D. Second, we posit that the composition...

Using a balanced panel of firm-level data on the manufacturing industry in France, Italy and Spain over the 1993-1997 period, this paper examines the impact of foreign presence on the productivity of domestic enterprises. We innovate on existing literature by using firm-level data comparable...

During the nineties, Europe became a major recipient of FDIs but Italian regions have been largely excluded from this process. Was it due to their characteristics, or were Italian regions 'doomed' by a negative country effect? In this paper we address this issue by estimating the determinants of...

The paper accounts for the determinants of inward foreign direct investment in business services across the EU-27 regions. Together with the traditional variables considered in the literature (market size, market quality, agglomeration economies, labour cost, technology, human capital), we focus...

We investigate the link between migration and inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in narrow geographies and adopt a novel econometric strategy to shed light on the underlying mechanism. We estimate mixed logit models to explain the location choice of 1,113 greenfield investments made by 895...

We propose a geoadditive negative binomial model (Geo-NB-GAM) for regional count data which allows us to simultaneously address some important methodological issues, such as spatial clustering, nonlinearities and overdispersion. We apply this model to study location determinants of inward...

Multinational firms are traditionally considered as firms possessing some technological lead and exploiting this proprietary advantage in international markets, but a growing literature has been arguing that multinational firms set up foreign subsidiaries not only as a means to exploit their own...

What determines multinational firms' location choices in Europe? Do national boundaries matter in location decisions? To what extent are European regional policies (Structural and Cohesion Funds) able to mitigate the agglomeration forces at work? Do location determinants differ for EU and US...

Recent empirical works on the within-sector impact of inward investments on domestic firms' productivity have found rather robust evidence of no (or even negative) effects. This paper argues that a specification error might characterise those studies. In fact, measuring foreign presence as the...