This paper examines the link between a firm's owership of productive assets and its choice of foreign-market entry strategy. We find that, controlling for industry- and country-specific characteristics, the most productive firms (i.e., those owning the most assets) will enter through greenfield...

This paper analyses the effect on agglomeration tendencies of allowing firms to become multi-region firms in a standard model of trade and location. More specifically, we introduce horizontal and vertical multi-region firms into the core-periphery (CP) model developed by Krugman (1991). The...

I show in this paper that incomplete contracts affect a firm's decision about serving foreign customers through exports or local sales from an affiliated plant. When contracts between two agents within a firm are too costly to write, the share of multinational firms may be higher or lower...

This paper discusses the gains from foreign direct investment (FDI) in a two country setting with endogenous markets structures under two alternative locations for the oligopolistic industry. If the oligopolistic industry is located in the domestic country only, we show that market concentration...

Most FDI takes place between the developed countries, which suggests that the market-seeking motive is important for understanding FDI. However, given the stylized fact that trade barriers (e.g. transportation costs and financial barriers) have declined over the past 20 years, models that aim to...

We analyze tax competition between two countries of unequal size trying to attract a foreign-owned monopolist. When regional governments have only a lump-sum profit tax (subsidy) at their disposal, but face exogenous and identical transport costs for imports, then both countries will always...

In a recent model Markusen and Venables (1999) describe the conditions under which foreign direct investments (FDI) can act as a catalyst for local industrial development. We apply this framework to the case of Poland, allowing for the entry of multinationals in both intfirmediates and...

We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign affiliate sales. We find that for...

We develop a model with two asymmetric countries. Firms choose the number andthe location of plants that they operate. The production of each firm increases whentrade costs fall. The fall also induces multinationals to repatriate their production intoa single country, which is likely to be the...