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),...

Relational contracts - informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships - are integral parts of global production processes. This paper develops a repeated-game model of global sourcing in which final goods producers decide whether to engage with their suppliers in relational...

The paper complements entry mode research by dealing with the choice of alternative modes of governance in the specific case of foreign R&D and its impact on a parent firm's performance. Firstly, we identify the factors that determine whether a firm locates abroad any R&D activities, and, if it...

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die internationale Expansion der Pharmaindustrie in Österreich und stellt diese in den Kontext der zunehmenden weltwirtschaftlichen Verflech-tungen. Die Pharmaindustrie in Österreich besteht einerseits aus den Filialen einiger inter-national tätiger...

Which firms find it optimal to integrate their input suppliers into the firm boundaries of control (vertical integration)? Which firms choose to expand their sourcing activities across the national border (offshoring)? This letter provides novel evidence on these questions based on a Spanish...

In this paper, we study the value chain of a Finnish designed bicycle and how the value added of the product is spread through the value chain in three distinct cases. In the first case the bicycle is manufactured in Finland by the researched company. In the two other cases the manufacturing of...

Our contribution to the expanding literature on the globalization of research and innovation is to investigate the extent to which sector-specific developments in an emerging technology (such as increasing interdisciplinarity and complexity) affect inventive activities developed abroad. We look...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...

This paper studies the relationship between export activities and firm-level productivity. Unique matching of German and Austrian micro data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that exporters are more productive by around 40 percent compared with non-exporters. Moreover, beside other analysis techniques,...

We develop a model in which multinational investors decide about the modes of organization, the locations of production, and the markets to be served. Foreign investments are driven by market-seeking and cost-reducing motives. We further assume that investors face costs of control that vary...