We show that multinational firms transmit shocks across countries through their internal capital markets. We study a credit supply shock to parent firms in Germany. International affiliates outside Germany supported their parents through internal lending, became financially constrained...

"By documenting the evolution of Tobin's "q" before, during, and after firms internationalize, this paper provides evidence on the bonding, segmentation, and market timing theories of internationalization. Using new data on 9,096 firms across 74 countries over the period 1989-2000, we find that...

We introduce a general quantifiable framework to study the location decisions of multinational firms. In the model, firms choose in which locations to pay the fixed costs of setting up production, taking into account potential complementarities among production locations. The firm's location...

We study the relationship between firm centralization and organizational reproduction in satellite locations. For decentralized firms, the ethnic compositions of inventors in satellite locations mostly resemble their host cities, with little link to the inventor composition of their parent...

We evaluate the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Combining reduced-form estimates from tax data with a global investment model, we estimate responses, identify parameters, and conduct counterfactuals. Domestic investment of firms with the mean tax change increases 20% versus a no-change baseline. Due...

We develop a model of export-platform foreign direct investment (FDI) in which final goods are produced only with labor and there are no fixed costs of exporting. We derive a simple condition that determines whether an MNE's plants are substitutes or complements. This condition is shaped by the...

This paper documents how US firms organize goods production across firm and country boundaries. Most US firms that perform physical transformation tasks in-house using foreign manufacturing plants in 2007 also own US manufacturing plants; moreover manufacturing comprises their main domestic...

In a stylized model of multinational firms choosing host locations for their global value chains, host-country governments choose the strength of collective-bargaining rights that allow their workers to receive a share of the resulting quasi-rents. Each government must trade off the direct...

We develop a positive model of multinational firm behavior and analyze a firm's incentive to transfer an intellectual property (IP) right of uncertain value offshore ex ante, i.e. before its success or failure is realized. Our analysis highlights two major aspects of this decision. First, an...

Multinational firms (MNEs) dominate trade flows, yet their global production decisions are often ignored in firm-level studies of exporting and importing. Using newly merged data on US firms' trade and multinational activity by country, we show that MNEs are more likely to trade not only with...