In the last decades, foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased strongly among industrialised countries. U.S. companies were the first to set up foreign affiliates followed later by companies from smaller industrialised countries. This paper develops a general equilibrium model of...

Die Öffnung der mittel- und osteuropäischen Staaten hat deutschen Investoren neue Investitionsmöglichkeiten eröffnet. Gleichzeitig bietet der Import ausländischen Kapitals für die Reformländer einen Weg zu einer effizienten Faktorakkumulation. In diesem Papier untersuchen wir die...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

The opening up of Central and Eastern Europe has provided new investment opportunities for German investors. At the same time, importing capital from abroad can be an efficient mechanism towards increased factor accumulation for the accession states to the European Union. In this paper, we study...

National and multinational companies coexist in many sectors of all developed countries. However, economic models fail to reproduce this fact because of the assumption of symmetry between companies. To show that the symmetry assumption is the reason for this failure, a two-country general...

Trade in intermediate goods as one possible link between rising trade and foreign direct investment is examined. To explain growing intermediate goods trade, three hypotheses are brought forward: outsourcing, global sourcing and the increasing importance of MNE networks. These hypotheses are...