“Factoryless” manufacturers, as defined by the U.S. OMB, perform underlying entrepreneurial components of arranging the factors of production but outsource all of the actual transformation activities to other specialized units. This paper describes efforts to measure “factoryless”...

This is a survey of the literature on multinational theory, focusing on its relation to the most recent international trade theory. Although the latter has experienced an impressive development in the last ten years, a comprehensive analysis of foreign direct investments is still missing. This...

This chapter reviews the state of the international trade literature on multinational firms. This literature addresses three main questions. First, why do some firms operate in more than one country while others do not? Second, what determines in which countries production facilities are...

FDI has received surprisingly little attention in theoretical and empirical work on openness and growth. This paper presents a theoretical growth model where MNCs directly affect the endogenous growth rate via technological spillovers. This is novel since other endogenous growth models with...

Using Japanese firm-level data, I examine whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) are more productive than non-MNEs in the services sector. I employ the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test to compare the overall distribution of productivity by multinational status. The results indicate that MNEs tend...

The percentage of exporters and multinational enterprises (MNEs) varies substantially across industries. We extend the firm heterogeneity model presented in Helpman et al. (2004) to derive testable predictions about the prevalence of these internationalized modes. The model indicates that...

We study the significant variation in intrafirm versus arm’s-length trade with micro data. Exploiting the fact that Korean is an uncommon second language and that Korean culture is relatively homogenous, we show how intrafirm sourcing by South Korean affiliates abroad increases with their...