Global engagement of firms can take a variety of forms. We argue that there are considerable advantages of developing models that allow for a wide set of alternatives of organizational form. We illustrate this firstly using plant level data which allows us to distinguish firms that serve only...

This study uses firm-level data on a large sample of European manufacturing firms to investigate the links between opening up foreign affiliates and firms' productivity. The analysis is guided by recent theoretical models of international trade with firm heterogeneity. The paper finds that while...

We examine the importance of a firm's own R&D activity and intra-sectoral spillovers on the decision to export and the export intensity using firm level panel data for Spain for the period 1990 to 1998. Our results are in line with preceding findings on the role played by firm-specific variables...

This paper presents an empirical analysis on the extent to which a country’s welfare spending influences foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions, particularly as they relate to relocations. We argue, and subsequently empirically test, that higher welfare spending by governments attracts...

In recent years the British government has spent substantial sums in order to attract foreign multiinationals to the UK. Amongst other things this has been motivated by the possibility that foreign multinationals bring with them new technologies which may "spill over" to the economy. The present...

We study the regional location of multinationals in Ireland since the 1970s by focusing on the role played by agglomeration economies and public incentives intent on dispersing industrial activity to the more disadvantaged areas of Ireland. We find that regional policy has only been effective in...

The first aim of this paper is to decompose the productivity advantage of foreign multinationals into two components: the technology and scale effect. The second aim is to analyse the causal relationship between foreign ownership and these two components of productivity growth. We do so by...

This paper focuses on the role of absorptive capacity in determining whether or not domestic establishments benefit from productivity spillovers from FDI. We analyse this issue using establishment level data for the electronics and engineering sectors in the UK. We distinguish the effect of FDI...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the causal effect of foreign acquisition on R&D intensity in targeted domestic firms. We are able to distinguish domestic multinationals and non-multinationals, which allows us to investigate the fear that the change in ownership of domestic to foreign...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...