Globalization has been identified by many experts as a new way firms organize their activities. This Paper surveys recent work that examines the role of trade integration between similar and dissimilar countries for these changes in corporate organization. It is shown that international...

A countertrade contract ties an export to an import. Usually, countertrade is seen as a form of bilateralism and reciprocity and thus as an inefficient form of international exchange. In this paper we argue that there are circumstances where the tying of two technologically unrelated trade flows...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the US and in Europe. This paper examines the role of market competition for this trend in corporate reorganization. We find that at intermediate levels of competition the CEO of the corporation decides...

This paper looks at Austria's pattern of development and its lessons for Eastern Europe. Austria's development path is characterized by three features. In the post-war era Austria was among the countries with the fastest convergence rate. At the same time Austria's movement up the technological...

The Paper takes a first look at the host and home country effects of German foreign direct investment (FDI) in Eastern Europe based on new survey data of 1050 investment projects in Eastern Europe by 420 German multinationals during the 1990s. We find that German investors transfer a substantial...

This paper develops a theory which investigates how firms' choice of corporate organization is affecting firm performance and the nature of competition in international markets. We develop a model in which firms' organisational choices determine heterogeneity across firms in size and...

Recent theories of the multinational corporation introduce the property rights model of the firm and examine whether to integrate our outsource firm activities locally or to a foreign country. This paper focus instead on the internal organization of the multinational corporation by examining the...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) argue that evidence on the international disparity in levels of per-capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

Countertrade agreements in international trade refer to a practice in which an exporter agrees to purchase in the future, from the importer, commodities proportional to his original export sale. The paper analyzes why it might be efficient for agents to undertake trade through a reciprocal...

In this paper we analyze the conditions under which a foreign direct investment (FDI) involves a net capital flow across countries. Frequently, foreign direct investment is financed in the host country without an international capital movement. We develop a model in which the optimal choice of...