Recent evidences show the co-existence of lower trade cost and higher amount of foreign direct investment (FDI), which cannot be explained by the traditional "proximity-concentration trade-off". We show that if both the home and the host country markets are important to the foreign firm, lower...

The relevance of services FDI strongly increased over the last two decades. As services and goods differ with respect to important characteristics, one may expect that the determinants of internationalisation are not identical in services and manufacturing. Surprisingly, there is practically no...

The relevance of services FDI strongly increased over the last two decades. As goods and services differ with respect to important characteristics, one may expect that the determinants of internationalisation are not identical in manufacturing and the service sector. However, there is...

This chapter reviews the state of the international trade literature on multinational firms. This literature addresses three main questions. First, why do some firms operate in more than one country while others do not? Second, what determines in which countries production facilities are...

The effects of ISO 9000 diffusion on trade and FDI have gone understudied. We employ panel data reported by OECD nations over the 1995-2002 period to estimate the impact of ISO adoptions on country-pair economic relations. We find ISO diffusion to have no effect in developed nations, but to...

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on environmental policy stringency in a two-country model with trade costs, where FDI could be unilateral and bilateral and both governments address local pollution through environmental taxes. We show that FDI does not give rise...

Theoretical considerations suggest that the option of waiting under conditions of uncertainty affects the relative importance of firm-level productivity and distance-related transaction costs as driving forces of FDI. Yet the timing of FDI has received little attention in the empirical...

We set up a trade model where three countries compete for an exogenous number of firms. Our innovation lies in the geography of the model. Of the three countries, one is the hub through which all trade takes place. First, we establish the natural geography of the region, which is given by the...

We set up a trade model where three countries compete for an exogenous number of firms. Our innovation lies in the geography of the model. Of the three countries, one is the hub through which all trade takes place. First, we establish the natural geography of the region, which is given by the...