Feenstra and Ma (2008) develop a monopolistic competition model where firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the profits from a new variety against the costs of cannibalizing sales of existing varieties. While more productive firms always have a higher market share, there is no...

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 studies why multinational firms often share ownership of a foreign affiliate with a local partner even in the absence of government restrictions on ownership. We show that shared ownership may arise, if (i) the partner owns assets that are potentially important for the investment...

Multinationals may enter a host market by different modes of foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper examines the choice of FDI mode, and shows that the profitability of greenfield investment influences this choice not only directly, but also indirectly since it determines the outside option...

This paper develops an oligopolistic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D to examine how trade liberalization affects firm and industry productivity, as well as social welfare. We identify four effects of trade liberalization on productivity: (i) a direct...

This paper uses a proportional hazard model to study foreign direct investment by Japanese manufacturers in Europe between 1970 and 1994. We divide each firm?s investment total into a sequence of individual investment decisions and analyze how firm-specific characteristics affect each decision....

We use Japanese firm-level data to examine how a firm?s productivity affects its choice of foreign-market entry strategy. We study a sequence of decisions, starting with the choice between exporting and foreign direct investment (FDI). In the case of FDI, the firm faces two options: greenfield...

We use unique plant-level data to study the link between the local availability of services and the decision of manufacturing firms to source materials from abroad. To guide our empirical analysis we develop a monopolistic-competition model of the materials sourcing decisions of heterogeneous...

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one...