This study investigates the impact of international outsourcing to low? and high income countries on total factor productivity growth based on manufacturing industry data for 14 OECD countries from 1995 ? 2000. We find that the broad measure of international outsourcing of material inputs to low...

Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

Firms cluster their economic activities to exploit technological and informational spillovers from other firms. Spillovers through the entry of multinational firms can be particularly beneficial to domestic firms because of their technological superiority. Yet, the importance of foreign firm's...

We investigate the link between productivity of firms and their sourcing behavior. Following Antràs & Helpman (2004) we distinguish between domestic and foreign sourcing, as well as between outsourcing and vertical integration. A firm's choice is driven by a hold-up problem caused by lack of...

This paper highlights the crucial role played by international access to intermediate inputs to explain firm-level performance, via two channels simultaneously: trade and FDI. We develop a simple theoretical model showing that trade integration of input market entails an efficiency improvement...

We explore the link between globalization of the retail sector and the export activity of firms from their origin country. In a previous paper (Cheptea et al., 2015), we showed that exporting firms from countries with internationalized retail companies benefit more from this process than firms...

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. We find that the distributions for multinationals dominate...

The accelerated overseas expansion of multinational retailers (MRs) over the last decade transformed these companies into major regional and global actors. In this paper we question how MRs arriving in foreign markets affect the export performance of local firms. We develop a theoretical...

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms (“stealing”) in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements (“learning”). The authors use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized...