This paper investigates why plants belonging to multi-plant firms are more likely to exit. Using Japanese plant data linked to firm data we study the process of plant closure among domestic multi-plant firms as well as multi-plant multinationals. As elsewhere in the literature these...

Myriad hypotheses have been advanced to explain the dismal performance of the post-1990 Japanese economy. In this paper we use plant and firm data to investigate the issue. The low rate of productivity growth in Japan is also often seen as a product of Japanese MNEs offshoring production and...

This paper investigates why multinational ownership is found to increase the probability that a plant will exit. It does so by using Japanese plant data linked to firm data. Plants belonging to a multinational are 9 percentage points more likely to exit when plant, firm and industry...

Do trade costs have consequences other than on the volume of international trade? In this paper we investigate whether countries’ trade costs act like other national endowments by affecting the composition of countries’ exports. Using an econometric approach that controls for endogeneity by...

This paper investigates whether differences across countries in overall country-specific trade costs affect comparative advantage. It does so by examining whether the commodity composition of countries’ trade is driven by differences in countries’ trade costs, as well as by differences in...

Using rich data on the international transactions of intermediate inputs by French firms we investigate the determinants of the choice between vertical integration and outsourcing at the international level. Our results show that the probability of vertical integration is reduced by the extent...

We quantify the effects of the container revolution on a large panel of product level trade flows during 1962-1990. We exploit time and cross-sectional variation in countries’ first adoption of container facilities to construct a time-varying bilateral container technology variable and...

This paper considers the effect of acquisition FDI on the knowledge production function. We distinguish between acquisitions by MNEs from technologically leading countries and those behind the technological frontier. We show that both acquire similarly R&D intensive domestic firms, but there are...

We consider the optimal education policies of a small economy whose government has a limited budget. Initially, the economy is closed and the government chooses its education policy to maximize welfare under autarky. Then the economy trades with the rest of the world. Lastly, the government...

We consider whether pollution-intensive FDI tends to outflow from a country which maintains stringent environmental regulations and into countries with weak environmental regulations. We consider this issue by incorporating the predictions from the recent heterogeneous firm models of...