Recent initiatives to hold back cross-border mergers and acquisitions for 'strategic' reasons have made headline news. We discuss whether the initiatives may mark the start of a new protectionist era. We argue that standard globalization indicators show no such signs. However, an increasing...

Recent literature on multinational firms has stressed the importance of low productivity as a barrier to the cross-border expansion of firms. But firms may also need external finance to shoulder the costs of entering foreign markets. We develop a model of multinational firms facing real and...

We analyze the relationship between offshoring and the onshore workforce composition in German multinational enterprises (MNEs), using plant data that allow us to discern tasks, occupations, and workforce skills. Offshoring is associated with a statistically significant shift towards more...

We propose a multi-country general equilibrium model with three sectors and heterogeneous firms to analyze the linkages between offshoring and exports. We model a world consisting of many advanced countries that trade differentiated goods among each other and one 'workbench country' that...

Exporters and multinationals are larger and more productive than their domestic counterparts. In addition to productivity, financial constraints and labor market constraints might constitute barriers to entry into foreign markets. We present new empirical evidence on the extensive and intensive...

Whereas many empirical studies show that the internationalization of production is driven by falling distance costs, theoretical models of the endogenous emergence of multinational enterprises predict the opposite. This paper argues that this dichotomy can be resolved if the production process...

We provide firm-level evidence concerning four key facts of services trade in Germany. First, not only firms classified as service firms, but also firms from all industries export and import services. Second, service trade patterns are fairly similar to those in goods trade. Most notably,...