Most international commerce is carried out by multinational firms, which use their foreign affiliates for the majority of their foreign sales. In this paper, I examine the determinants of multinational firms' location and production decisions and the welfare implications of multinational...

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies over the period 1982--2006 averaged 9.4 percent annually after taxes; U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged only 3.2 percent. Two factors distort...