Global value chains have fundamentally transformed international trade and development in recent decades. We use matched firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines and...

Recent work documents declining business dynamism in the United States, with concerning implications for markups, innovation and productivity. Using import data for 146 countries over three decades we document a set of new stylized facts describing market dynamism world-wide. Market entry rates...

Firm integration is fundamentally shaped by contractual frictions. But do better contracting institutions, reducing these frictions, induce firms to be more or less deeply integrated? To address this question, this paper exploits unique micro data on ownership shares across more than 200,000...

Prior literature is ambivalent about whether organizational complexity has positive or negative effects on firm performance. Using rich data on global service providers, we explore this ambivalence by disentangling performance consequences of different types of organizational complexity. We show...

Available statistics tell us little about the economic consequences of increasing global dispersion of production processes. In order to shed light on the issue, we perform grass roots detective work to uncover the geography of value added in the case of a Nokia N95 smartphone circa 2007. The...

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...

This paper analyses the role of services in international trade through the lens of global value chains (GVCs). Services account for more than 70% of world GDP but only for around 20% of world trade in balance of payments terms. In value added terms, accounting for services embodied in exported...

Using the OECD analytical AMNE database, this paper provides new evidence on the services activities of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and discusses the relationship between cross-border trade in services and the production of services through foreign affiliates (“mode 3” trade in services...

This paper empirically examines the effects of financial crises on the organization of production of multinational enterprises. We construct a panel of European multinational networks from 2003 through 2015. We use as a financial shock the increase in risk premia between August 2007 and July...

Policymakers in several countries have recently taken steps to promote the rapid export expansion of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The goal of these policies has been to create successful export-intensive firms, which are often referred to as born globals. These measures are...