This paper applies a novel empirical approach to characterising the horizontal-ness and vertical-ness of affiliates based on Yeaple's complex FDI concept. In its simplest form, horizontal-ness is measured as affiliates' local sales share while their vertical-ness is measures as their share of...

Revolutionary transformations of industry and trade occurred from 1985 to the late-1990s - the regionalisation of supply chains. Before 1985, successful industrialisation meant building a domestic supply chain. Today, industrialisers join supply chains and grow rapidly because offshored...

The trade linked to international production networks - supply-chain trade for short - is associated with momentous global economic changes. This paper presents a portrait of the global pattern of supply-chain trade and how it has evolved since 1995. The paper draws on a variety of data sources...

This article reviews the state of the international trade literature on multinational firms. This literature addresses three main questions. First, why do some firms operate in more than one country while others do not? Second, what determines in which countries production facilities are...

One feature of globalization is that countries are increasingly specialized in either innovation or in production. To understand the forces behind this specialization and its welfare consequences, we develop a monopolistic competition model of trade and multinational production (MP) in which...

A growing literature seeks to understand how the characteristics of firms shape the manner in which they serve foreign markets. We consider an environment in which multiproduct firms can sell their products in multiple countries from multiple locations. We show that there are strong empirical...

This paper presents and tests a new model of multinational firms to explain a rich array of multinational behavior. In contrast to most approaches, here the multinational faces costs to transferring its know-how that are increasing in technological complexity. Costly technology transfer gives...

We use firm-level data for U.S. multinational enterprises (MNE) and the model of firm heterogeneity first presented in Helpman, Melitz, and Yeaple (2004) to make four empirical contributions. First, we show that the most productive U.S. firms invest in a larger number of foreign countries and...

The global pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI) is quite similar to the world trade pattern. In particular, intraindustry FDI between rich nations is almost as pervasive as intraindustry trade among rich nations. In the standard' MNC model (of Markusen, Venables, Brainard, and others), FDI...

We develop an assignment theory to analyze the volume and composition of foreign direct investment (FDI). Firms conduct FDI by either engaging in greenfield investment or in cross-border acquisitions. Cross-border acquisitions involve firms trading heterogeneous corporate assets to exploit...