Heterogeneous firm models of international trade include a country specific sunk cost that firms pay to enter a foreign market. Despite the important role these costs play in determining firm participation, we understand little about their structure. In particular, we do not know if there are country complementarities or general exporting experience components in entry costs. Characterizing the...

Nike and other brand companies have long been the target of widespread criticism for outsourcing their manufacturing production to contract factories with dismal working conditions. Despite the overwhelming amount of public interest, there exists no theory for studying this topic. The current paper fills this gap. In the model, the most productive firms in the North make high profits and outsou...

The theoretical effects of labour regulations such as employment protection legislation (EPL) on innovation is ambiguous, and empirical evidence has thus far been inconclusive. EPL increases job security and the greater enforceability of job contracts may increase worker investment in innovative activity. On the other hand EPL increases adjustment costs faced by firms, and this may lead to unde...

With few exceptions, the empirical literature on foreign direct investment (FDI) continues to be gender-blind. This paper contributes to filling this gap by assessing the importance of gender inequality in education as a determinant of FDI. We estimate a standard gravity model on bilateral FDI flows which is augmented by educational variables, including different measures of gender inequality i...

This paper presents three new patent-based indicators of internationalisation of technology reflecting international cooperation in research and the location of research facilities of multinational firms. They witness both an increasing trend towards the globalisation of technology in the OECD area and large cross-country differences in the extent of internationalisation. An empirical analysis ...

This paper investigates why multinational ownership is found to increase the probability that a plant will exit. It does so by using Japanese plant data linked to firm data. Plants belonging to a multinational are 9 percentage points more likely to exit when plant, firm and industry characteristics are conditioned on. We find that the “footloose” effect is attributable to multinationals closing...

Article history: Received 5 December 2011 Received in revised form 31 August 2012 Accepted 4 September 2012 Available online 11 September 2012 We investigate international joint ventures in an integrated market using a two-country model with asymmetric sizes. We show that although the domestic firm in the small country is less efficient, it is possible that the government of the small country i...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tariff cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tariff reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage point decrease in tariff rates can lead to total factor productivity gains of up to 2 percent. The d...

This paper examines whether UK firms that locate their R&D activity in the USA benefit more than other UK firms from knowledge spillovers originating from US R&D. Patent data provides a firm-level measure of the location of innovative activity, which enables the identification of knowledge spillovers associated with "technology sourcing". Our identification strategy helps to address various pro...

This paper uses affiliate level data from Swedish multinationals to examine the impact of tax treaties on both overall affiliate sales and the composition of those sales. In line with previous results, we find little evidence for an effect of treaties on the level of total sales. We do, however, find that a tax treaty increases the probability of investment by a firm in a given country. In addi...