It is striking that by far the lion’s share of empirical studies on the impact of outsourcing on firms considers industrialized countries. However, outsourcing by firms from emerging economies is far from negligible and growing. This paper investigates the link between outsourcing and...

Deutschland weist seit mehreren Jahren einen anhaltenden Leistungsbilanzüberschuss auf. Im Vorfeld der Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise stieg der Überschuss über mehrere Jahre deutlich an und hatte im Jahr 2007 über 7 Prozent des Bruttoinlandsprodukts (BIP) erreicht. Neben Deutschland wiesen...

This paper analyses the effect of foreign acquisition on survival probability and employment growth of target plant using data on Swedish manufacturing plants during the period 1993-2002. An improvement over previous studies is that we take into account firm level heterogeneity by separating the...

Starting from the observation that all firms in Ireland (foreign and domestic in manufacturing and services industries) were hit by the crisis, the paper asks whether there is a difference in the behaviour of foreign and domestic firms. One hypothesis is that foreign multinationals are less...

This paper investigates the effects of services offshoring on wages using individual-level data combined with industry information on offshoring for the United Kingdom. Our results show that services offshoring affects the real wage of low- and medium-skilled individuals negatively. By contrast,...

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 provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing, domestic outsourcing, profits and innovation using plant level data. We find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level. Such a...

Using a unique firm level data set from the Chinese manufacturing sector, this paper analyses the impact of production subsidies on firms’ export performance. It documents robust evidence that production subsidies stimulate export activity, although this effect is conditional on firm...

Many governments offer significant inducements to attract inward investment, motivated by the expectation of spillover benefits. This paper begins by reviewing possible sources of spillovers. It then provides a comprehensive evaluation of the empirical evidence on productivity, wages and exports...

This paper calculates returns to scale and productivity growth in UK manufacturing establishments in the electronics and food industries. Our results show that foreign establishments tend to have lower returns to scale than their domestic counterparts. We also examine the effect of the...