Within Japanese multinational firms, parent exports from Japan to a foreign region are positively related to production in that region by affiliates of that parent, given the parent's home production in Japan and the region's size and income level. This relationship is similar to that found for...

Since 1977, and in some cases starting before that, most East Asian countries' export patterns in manufacturing have been transformed from industry distributions typical of developing countries to distributions more like those of advanced countries. The process of change in most cases started...

This study examines the relationship between Japan's manufactured exports to individual markets and the economic activities of foreign manufacturing affiliates of Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) and U.S. MNCs in those markets. First, the relationships between Japanese export levels...

Using a unique database on all Japanese manufacturing plants in the United States, we examine the relationship between plant size and growth for these foreign-owned plants. These plants average sizes are three times larger than comparable U.S. plants and experienced 30 percent growth from 1987...

This paper focuses on two issues. First, a reexamination of the data on the level of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Japan suggests that foreign firms sell five to six times more in Japan than is commonly believed. Previous studies severely underestimated the stock of FDI in Japan due to poor...

Are location-specific factors--such as the education and attitude of the local workforce, supplier networks, institutional infrastructure, and local "culture"--important for understanding persistent heterogeneities among firms? We address this question in the context of the automobile industry....

We apply a modified 'gravity model' incorporating measures of factor endowments to analyze Japanese and U.S. bilateral trade flows and direct foreign investment positions with a sample of around 100 countries for the period 1985-1990. Country features that our analysis takes into account are...

Recent theories of economic geography suggest that firms in the same industry may be drawn to the same locations because proximity generates positive externalities or 'agglomeration effects.' Under this view, chance events and government inducements can have a lasting influence on the...

We develop a simple model of the choice between exploiting a technology in another country via export and via direct foreign investment. The model points to the destination country's size, level of technological sophistication, and distance from the source as factors in the decision. Moreover,...

Recent empirical work has examined the extent to which international trade fosters international spillovers' of technological information. FDI is an alternate, potentially equally important channel for the mediation of such knowledge spillovers. I introduce a framework for measuring...