Many previous studies have shown that the localisation of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

We study the coagglomeration of domestic plants and foreign multinationals and the impact of this on domestic plant growth using data for Irish manufacturing. To this end we make use of the index developed by Ellison and Glaeser (1997) and find coagglomeration to be important for a number of...

This Paper presents an empirical study of the effect of foreign multinational companies on the development of indigenous firms in the host country. Our starting point is a recent paper by Markusen and Venables (1999) that shows formally that multinationals, through the creation of linkages with...

Many previous studies have shown that the localization of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

This paper investigates whether government support can act to increase exporting activity. We use a uniquely rich data set on Irish manufacturing plants and employ an empirical strategy that combines a non-parametric matching procedure with a difference-in-differences estimator in order to deal...

This Paper examines whether multinational companies are more ‘footloose’ than their domestic counterparts in the host country, using data for the Irish manufacturing sector. First, we investigate whether plant survival rates differ between multinationals and indigenous plants. Second, we...

We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being...

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...

We re-examine the effects of liquidity constraints on R&D investment. In our theoretical section we extend the neoclassical framework of investment in physical capital by introducing R&D and liquidity constraints. We analyse this issue empirically using firm-level data for R&D active...

We investigate whether government subsidies to local input manufacturers encourage procurement from foreign firms. We use a comprehensive panel data of Irish firms from 1983 until 2002. Our data shows a spontaneity about linkages and relative insensitivity to grant aid, although it may be the...