A proposed reason for the significant inverse relationship between distance (both physical and cultural) and foreign direct investment is the increased costs for a parent firm to monitor an affiliate when there is greater distance between them. We provide the first direct test of this hypothesis...

This paper assesses the evidence regarding the effects of multinational production on wages and working conditions in developing countries. It is motivated by recent controversies concerning whether multinational firms in developing countries exploit workers by paying low wages and subjecting...

In this paper, we study the effects of FDI on domestic employment by examining the data of Taiwan's manufacturing industry. Treating domestic production and overseas production as two distinctive outputs from a joint production function, we may estimate the effect of overseas production on the...

Fears that production abroad would cause home country exports and employment to fall have not been confirmed by evidence. Multinational operations have led to a shift by parent firms in the United States toward more capital- intensive and skill- intensive domestic production. However, that type...

This paper analyzes the effects of the U.S. tax treatment of the R&D activities of American multinationals. Recent evidence indicates that the level of R&D spending is highly sensitive to its after-tax cost. The U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986 reduced the tax deductions that many American firms can...

Employment at multinational enterprises (MNEs) responds to wages at the extensive margin, when an MNE enters a foreign location, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates. We present an MNE model and conditions for parametric and nonparametric identification. Prior...

A Melitz-style model of monopolistic competition with heterogeneous firms is integrated into a simple New Economic Geography model to show that the standard assumption of identical firms is neither necessary nor innocuous. We show that re-locating to the big region is most attractive for the...

Are foreign production and exports substitutes or complements? The continuing globalization of production makes the question of the relationship between trade and foreign direct investment ever more important. Standard theory of the multinational corporation (MNC) assumes substitution, while...