Global Firms

Global Firms*

Research in international trade has changed dramatically over the last twenty years, as attention has shifted from countries and industries towards the firms actually engaged in international trade. The now-standard heterogeneous firm model posits a continuum of firms that compete under monopolistic competition (and hence are measure zero) and decide whether to export to foreign markets. Howeve...

Organizational forms for global engagement of firms

Global engagement of firms can take a variety of forms. We argue that there are considerable advantages of developing models that allow for a wide set of alternatives of organizational form. We illustrate this firstly using plant level data which allows us to distinguish firms that serve only the domestic market, firms that export final goods abroad, firms that outsource abroad the production o...

Entrepreneurs , Firms and Global Wealth since 1850

Framing responsibility: global firms’ environmental motivations

A recurring theme in international political economy is that responsibility for regulation is moving from the public to the private sphere, particularly from states to globally integrated markets. One of the clearest cases of this is multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly adopting codes of conduct for the impact of their activities, including environmental impacts. MNCs also produce rep...

How Multinational Firms Use IT to Manage Their Global Operations

Despite a generally-acknowledged importance of IT in enabling global strategy and a broad understanding of the manner in which IT enhances coordination and reduces cost, few studies have focused precisely on how multinational firms use IT to facilitate globalization. We conduct a detailed case study across four major multinational firms, and use primary data to develop theoretical propositions ...