In this paper, I will first give an overview of the current regulation of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the WTO and OECD. Then I will criticise the draft of the multilateral agreement on investment (MAI), that was proposed as a new framework for FDI. Though the MAI has failed, the original...

Does anti-migration sentiment threaten internationalization? One major pro-Brexit argument was that it would enable more control over immigration. The most recent US presidential election also focused on immigration. Anti-migration sentiment could be a threat to internationalization, given that...

The structure of a multinational firm, that is how its affiliates relate to one another, is critical for understanding where multinationals locate, how policy affects them, and their resilience to localized shocks. Here, we review the two main structures - market-seeking horizontal and...

The past decades witnessed big changes in international trade with the rise of global value chains. Some countries, such as China, Poland, and Vietnam rode the tide, while other countries, many in the Africa region, faltered. This paper studies the determinants of participation in global value...

Trade economists have for long considered gravity models to estimate unexhausted potentials for bilateral trade. Similar to the discrepancy between "normal" and "actual" bilateral trade, one may ask the question about the difference between "normal" and actual bilateral multinational activity....

This paper investigates the impact of deep integration in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) on multinational production (MP), i.e. the production carried out by firms outside of their country of origin. Using a structural gravity model, we find that tariff reductions have a positive impact on...

This paper uses high-frequency data for publicly-listed Japanese manufacturing firms over the period 2000 to 2010 to show that a greater reliance on foreign market sales increases the conditional volatility of firms' stock returns. The two margins of global engagement we consider, namely,...

While countries make use of a wide range of policies to attract multinational firms, identifying the effect of such policies is difficult. Combining firm-level data on both the location of these firms' foreign affiliates and detailed service-specific information from Costa Rica's investment...

To serve foreign markets, firms can either export or set up a local subsidiary through horizontal Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The conventional proximity-concentration theory suggests that FDI substitutes for trade if distance between countries is large, while exports become more important...

This paper analyses to what extent working conditions in foreign-owned firms differ from those in their domestic counterparts. It makes three main contributions. First, we replicate the consensus in the empirical literature by applying a standardised methodology to firm-level data for three...