This paper analyses how international outsourcing affects plant productivity. The results point to a striking pattern: the status of being an outsourcer matters strongly for firms that are indigenous and not exporting, while for exporters and foreign affiliates, tfp increases are lower,...

This paper provides new estimates of international trade in services for mode 3 (foreign affiliates’sales in a host country) for four major OECD countries, thanks to the harmonisation of FATS statistics with conventional international trade ones (trade recorded in the balances of payments –...

This paper questions whether the overseas expansion of a country’s retailers fosters overall bilateral exports towards these host markets. To address this question, we consider an empirical trade model, where the foreign sales of multinational retailers reduce the fixed and variable trade...

We investigate how the export performance of firms in China is influenced by credit constraints. Using panel data from Chinese customs for 1997-2007, we show that credit constraints restrict international trade flows and affect the sectoral composition of firms’ activity. We confirm that...

Based on matching techniques in combination with a difference-in-difference estimator, this paper estimates the effects at home of initiating production abroad through the establishment of a foreign production affiliate. The analysis covers manufacturing and service firms active in France during...

In the present paper, we investigate whether previous findings of limited effects of investing abroad on the firm’s performance can be explained by the aggregation of heterogeneous effects depending on the FDI motives, sectors and locations. Results suggest, in line with previous work, that on...

With the progress of information and communication technologies, the cost and efforts to remotely exchange information have drastically fallen. It has created new opportunities to leverage comparative advantages by reorganizing value chains along the geographic dimension and by reconsidering the...

Since the global crisis, China's foreign trade is no longer driven by its involvement in the global supply chains (i.e. by processing trade) but its dynamics stems from China’s own domestic demand and supply. For foreign funded enterprises, China is less and less a production base for export...

This paper uses micro-data on balance sheets, trade, and the nationality of ownership of firms in France to investigate the effect of foreign multinationals on business cycle comovement. We first show that foreign affiliates, which represent a tiny fraction of all firms, are responsible for a...