Whether a firm is able to attract foreign capital and whether it may participate at the export market depends on whether the fixed costs associated with doing so are at least covered by the incremental operating profits. This paper provides evidence that success for some firms in attracting...

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one...

This paper uses high-frequency data for publicly-listed Japanese manufacturing firms over the period 2000 to 2010 to show that a greater reliance on foreign market sales increases the conditional volatility of firms' stock returns. The two margins of global engagement we consider, namely,...

This paper studies the life-cycle dynamics of exporters and multinational enterprises (MNEs). We present a dynamic model of trade and MNE activity in which the mode of serving a market depends on the well-known proximity-concentration tradeoff. We show that the option of performing MNE...

Almost two thirds of the cross-plant dispersion in marginal revenue products of capital occurs across plants within the same firm rather than between firms. Even though firms allocate invest- ment very differently across their plants, they do not equalize marginal revenue products across their...

Economic regions, such as urban agglomerations, face external demand and price shocks that produce income risk. Workers in large and diversified agglomerations may benefit from reduced wage volatility, while firms may outsource the production of intermediate goods and realize benefits from...