Fears that production abroad would cause home country exports and employment to fall have not been confirmed by evidence. Multinational operations have led to a shift by parent firms in the United States toward more capital- intensive and skill- intensive domestic production. However, that type...

The impacts of inward FDI on host countries are frequently studied using balance-of-payments based measures of flows and stocks. These are unreliable for the purpose because, while theories of the effects of investment are based on FDI production and employment in the host country, these...

The concept and measurement of foreign direct investment have changed over time, and what is measured by balance of payments flows and stocks is quite different from what is implied by theories of direct investment. The industrial distribution of stocks of FDI, the most widely available measure,...

In each of three financial and exchange rate crises, Latin America in 1982, Mexico in 1994, and East Asia in 1997, direct investment inflows into the affected countries have behaved differently from other forms of investment, and U.S. manufacturing affiliates have behaved differently from other...

Using U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data for individual foreign acquisitions and new establishments in the U.S from 1988 to 1998, and aggregate data for 1980 to 1998, we find that acquisitions and establishments of new firms tend to occur in periods of high U.S. growth and take place mainly...

Investment in production outside the United States is a method by which U.S. firms raise their shares in foreign markets and defend them against foreign rivals from the host countries and from other countries. The investing firms are exploiting their firm-specific assets such as proprietary...

Network connections within MNCs seem to improve export market shares for Asian affiliates of those MNCs. In particular, Asian affiliates of U.S. MNCs export more to markets where their parent firms' exports to affiliates are larger, and less to markets where their parent firms export more to...

Using confidential individual firm data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis survey of U.S. firms' manufacturing operations abroad, we investigate the determinants of capital intensity in affiliate operations. Host country labor cost, the scale of host country production, and the capital...

The standard measures of flows and stocks of FDI view FDI as a financial flow and its accumulation as a stock, but most uses of FDI data require measures of employment, payrolls, capital inputs, and output from FDI. Judging by data for the United States, the flow and stock data provide rough...

World trade in services has recently been a little under $US2 trillion, about a quarter of world trade in goods. That ratio does not appear to have changed much in the last 50 years. For the US, exports of services have recently been over 40% and imports about 20% of exports and imports of...