Wholesale and retail trade affiliates owned by parent firms in manufacturing account for a considerable fraction of overall affiliate sales. Although quantitatively important, this Export-Supporting FDI (ESFDI) activity has received little attention in the literature. This paper includes ESFDI...

The business literature has long recognized the importance of multinationals' distribution networks. The empirical analysis of distribution-oriented FDI has, however, received little attention which is at least partly due to the lack of appropriate data. We outline a slightly modified version of...

We analyze whether firms that establish their first affiliate in a foreign country have a different pattern of growth in output, employment, capital and productivity than firms that remain national. We use firm-level data on German multinational activities and appropriate matching techniques to...

Gravity equations explaining foreign affiliates' sales are ad hoc and hence, estimated coeffcients are hard to interpret. We therefore provide the theoretical underpinnings of the gravity equation applied to the analysis of sales of foreign affiliates of multinational firms. We argue that the...

In this paper we argue that the surge in world trade over the two decades preceding the global downturn of 2008-09 can be partly explained by the export-magnification effect of offshoring. In a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms we show analytically that a fall in variable...

The business literature and recent descriptive evidence show that exporting firms typically require the help of foreign trade intermediaries or need to set up own foreign wholesale affiliates. In contrast, conventional trade theory models assume that producers can directly access foreign...

We explore the role of trade in differentiated final goods as well ollshoring of tasks for inequality both within and between countries. We emphasize the distinction between managerial and production labor. Managerial labor is a fixed input while production labor is a variable input. Following...

Despite the fact that many modern preferential trade agreements include commitments to foreign investors in imperfectly competitive services sectors, the literature has not established conditions under which these agreements are beneficial or harmful. The authors fill that void by developing a...

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...