We analyze whether firms that establish their first affiliate in a foreign country have a different pattern of growth in output, employment, capital and productivity than firms that remain national. We use firm-level data on German multinational activities and appropriate matching techniques to...

Gravity equations explaining foreign affiliates' sales are ad hoc and hence, estimated coeffcients are hard to interpret. We therefore provide the theoretical underpinnings of the gravity equation applied to the analysis of sales of foreign affiliates of multinational firms. We argue that the...

Firms cluster their economic activities to exploit technological and informational spillovers from other firms. Spillovers through the entry of multinational firms can be particularly beneficial to domestic firms because of their technological superiority. Yet, the importance of foreign firm's...

We propose a multi-country general equilibrium model with three sectors and heterogeneous firms to analyze the linkages between offshoring and exports. We model a world consisting of many advanced countries that trade differentiated goods among each other and one "workbench country" that...

The business literature has long recognized the importance of multinationals’ distribution networks. The empirical analysis of distribution-oriented FDI has, however, received little attention which is at least partly due to the lack of appropriate data. We outline a slightly modified version...

Trade in intermediate goods as one possible link between rising trade and foreign direct investment is examined. To explain growing intermediate goods trade, three hypotheses are brought forward: outsourcing, global sourcing and the increasing importance of MNE networks. These hypotheses are...

Whereas many empirical studies show that the internationalization of production is driven by falling distance costs, theoretical models of the endogenous emergence of multinational enterprises predict the opposite. This paper argues that this dichotomy can be resolved if the production process...

The activities of multinational enterprises drive the economic globalization process to a very large degree. This paper lists some facts about their dominant role in all channels of globalization. Therefore, the importance of multinational enterprises in foreign direct investment and production...

This paper brings forward a three-country model to analyze the internationalization process in the age of globalization. It is shown that investment of one company increases not only the incentive to invest in another country for every national competitor but for third country's companies as...

Economic theory provides two main explanations why changes in exchange rates can affect foreign direct investment (FDI). According to a first explanation, FDI reacts to exchange rate changes if there are information frictions on capital markets and if the investment by firms depends on their net...