We integrate international business theory on foreign direct investment (FDI) with institutional theory on intellectual property rights (IPR) to explain characteristics and behaviour of foreign investment subsidiaries in Central East Europe, a region with an IPR regimegap visàvis West European...

This paper investigates the geography of multinational corporations' investments in the EU regions. The ‘traditional' sources of location advantages (i.e. agglomeration economies, market access and labour market conditions) are considered together with innovation and socio-institutional...

The beneficial effects of innovation for firms' performance and competitiveness are well documented, but it has been suggested in recent years that innovation regimes differ between advanced and emerging economies. While advanced economies rely on knowledge generation, their emerging...

The globalisation of R&D activities has continued to grow as companies are increasingly trying to capture knowledge and market opportunities internationally. The rapid evolution of national economies and the ways to conduct knowledge-intensive businesses has brought researchers and analysts to...

We build on international business (IB) developments over the past 55 years or so, to inform our understanding of the nature, objectives and essence of the MNE. We suggest that in contrast to the conventional economics-based approaches that have been dominant in the field of IB for many decades,...

In recent years, there has been a fundamental shift in the innovation architecture of global firms. Rapid growth of the middle class in emerging markets, led by China, India, Brazil and Russia, is fueling the need to create affordable innovations in local markets. Such local innovations tend to...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

Does FDI affect productivity growth, innovation, and knowledge sourcing activities ofdomestic firms? This study employs detailed firm-level panel-data from Estonia’smanufacturing sector to investigate different channels through which FDI can affectdomestic firms. I use instrumental variables...

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in emerging economies: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge...