The paper develops a simple theoretical model of inventory control in global value chains. It identifies a role for intermediaries in managing inventory, and shows that inserting an intermediary as an additional link in a value chain is profitable when demand volatility is high. It also provides...

This paper investigates the role of firm productivity in drawing firm boundaries in global sourcing. Our analysis focuses on how productivity affects the allocation of ownership rights between the headquarter of a firm and its intermediate input supplier (vertical integration vs. outsourcing),...

This paper analyzes the behavior of firm(s) serving its products to two countries having different consumers in terms of their valuation of product quality. The home-market of firm(s) is a developed country with small population but high valuation of product quality, while the foreign is a...

This paper explores the role of FDI-spillover prevention costs in the strategic choice for a MNE of a developed country such as Japan about whether it perform FDI to an emerging economy such as Russia and China and about a degree of FDI spillovers that it allows. After discussing the exogenous...

We set up a two-country general equilibrium model, in which heterogeneous firms from one country (the source country) can offshore routine tasks to a low-wage host country. The most productive firms self-select into offshoring, and the impact on welfare in the source country can be positive or...

We use Spanish firm-level data to test the hold-up model of global sourcing proposed by Antr s & Helpman (2004). We propose a novel representation of the model which guides us in bringing the theory to the data. We estimate a discrete choice model of firms' sourcing behavior, separately for the...

We address the mismatch between existing theoretical models and standard empirical practice in the analysis of the labor market effects of offshoring. While theory focuses on one-sector or two-sector models, empirical studies exploit variation in offshoring across a large number of industries,...

Combining administrative data on German workers with commercial data on German producers, we find evidence that German subsidiaries of foreign multinationals, while paying a premium relative to other local producers, offer wages of similar size as German subsidiaries of German multinationals....

We look at managerial and production wages in countries that differ in size and relative endowments. Production labor is assumed to be a variable input composed of tradable tasks, while managerial labor is a fixed, non-tradable input. Task performance is subject to increasing returns to scale on...

This paper uses micro-data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys to investigate how foreign ownership affects the likelihood of manufacturers in developing countries to export and/or import both directly and in- directly. Applying propensity score matching to control for differences across...