This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a non-parametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...

According to the ‘convergence hypothesis’, multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998)...

Using plant-level data for the Irish manufacturing sector over the period 1983-98, we study the coagglomeration of domestic plants and foreign multinationals in Ireland. To this end we make use of the index developed by Ellison and Glaeser (1997) and find coagglomeration to be important for a...