The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been proposed in recent literature as an emerging solution approach to large, dynamic, and complex real world multi-criteria decision making problems, such as the strategic planning of organizational resources and the justification of new manufacturing technology. This paper presents an application of the AHP in firms' long-term overall performance evalu...

Chinese processing trade has grown considerably as firms have adopted a wide array of organizational forms to have their products assembled in China for export. To understand the coexistence of processing via foreign investment versus multiple forms of outsourcing, we modify Grossman and Helpman’s (2004) of managerial incentives to account for the economic costs associated with various firms’ i...

This study builds on developments in transaction cost economics to examine how institutional environment and transaction (project) characteristics affect governance of inter-firm alliances. The focus is on the choice between equity and contractual alliance forms under differing regimes of intellectual property protection and other national institutional features. Empirical results identify tran...

It is often observed that in order to serve the domestic market, foreign firms not only export but also control domestic firms through foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper examines the effects of tariffs, production subsidies, and foreign ownership regulation on prices, outputs, profits, and welfare when both exports and FDI coexist. Cross-border ownership on the basis of both financial ...

Tax incentives offered to attract firms engaged in foreign direct investment are often tied to performance requirements such as domestic content restrictions. The tax competition literature has repeatedly shown that competition between municipalities for mobile firms tends to drive taxes to low levels. One would expect a comparable result for burdensome performance requirements. Despite this, t...

In this paper we analyze a country’s optimal trade policy when its labor market is unionized and firms are footloose. We show that an important objective for governments to use import protection is to prevent their domestic multinationals to go to a non-unionized location abroad and to serve their country from a distance. A domestic government will set a positive tariff to dissuade its multinat...

This paper analyses the determinants of trade patterns between the CEECs and the OECD countries since the latter began their processes of transition and opening-up within the framework of the Association Agreements with the EU, with the ultimate aim of helping to anticipate the trade impact of their accession to the EU. To this end, we estimate an empirical model for a set of countries formed b...

The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as "black boxes", despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these agreements. We overcome this serious limitation by analyzing the impact of modalities on the admissi...

This study seeks to explain why, in some cases, locationally advantageous countries attract foreign firms, who develop dominant competitive positions in the market, rather than facilitate the development of internationally competitive national firms, as theory suggests. Comparative analyses of samples of foreign and British-owned insurance firms in the London wholesale insurance market are used...

This paper investigates the two-way relationship between R&D and export activity. In particular, we concern ourselves with the question whether R&D stimulates exports and, perhaps more importantly, whether export activity leads to increasing innovative activity in terms of R&D (learning by exporting). We use two unique firm level databases for Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland and compa...