Each of the world's largest retailers---Walmart, Carrefour, Tesco, and Metro---entered China after 1995. Their subsequent expansion in China may have influenced Chinese exports through two channels. First, they may have enhanced bilateral exports between the retailers' Chinese operations and...

We study Japanese investments between 1980 and 1992 to assess the effectiveness of state promotion efforts in light of strong agglomeration economies in Japanese investment. Two policy variables are consistently shown to influence the location of investment - foreign trade zones and labor...

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...

A recent American Economic Review article by David L. Carr, James R. Markusen, and Keith E. Maskus (CMM) estimates a regression specification based upon the 'knowledge-capital' model of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE). The knowledge-capital model combines 'horizontal' motivations for FDI --...

Large firms played a central role in the “new trade” models that became a major focus of trade economists in the early 1980s. Subsequent literature for the most part kept imperfect competition but jettisoned oligopoly. Instead, as the heterogeneous firms literature burgeoned in the 2000s,...

This paper develops a model in which upstream network insiders' conduct relationship specific investment that induces the downstream firm to transact within networks. The scale of destination-country production and part-specific measures of the importance of network relationships and engineering...

This paper estimates the role of country-variety comparative advantage in the decision to offshore assembly of more than 2000 models of 197 car brands headquartered in 23 countries. While offshoring in the car industry has risen from 2000 to 2016, the top five offshoring brands account for half...

We investigate whether productivity differences explain why some manufacturers sell only to the domestic market while others serve foreign markets through exports and/or FDI. When overseas production offers no cost advantages, our model predicts that investors should be more productive than...