This paper studies why multinational firms often share ownership of a foreign affiliate with a local partner even in the absence of government restrictions on ownership. We show that shared ownership may arise, if (i) the partner owns assets that are potentially important for the investment...

Global engagement of firms can take a variety of forms. We argue that there are considerable advantages of developing models that allow for a wide set of alternatives of organizational form. We illustrate this firstly using plant level data which allows us to distinguish firms that serve only...

We contribute to the nascent literature on the heterogeneity of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the relevance of firm characteristics for analyzing the determinants of outward foreign direct investment (FDI). The focus is on the role of firm-level heterogeneity when MNEs decide on the share...

This paper studies the determinants of Austrian bilateral intrafirm trade in a panel of industry-level intrafirm goods trade flows. Economic size, unit labor costs and the magnification effects originating from multiple border crossing of sequentically finished products are found to be the most...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...