Multinationals without Advantages

Bilateral Migration and Multinationals

This paper starts by observing two novel facts. First, bilateral migration flows are pervasive across OECD countries, both for high-skilled and low-skilled workers. This fact goes against the common belief that migration merely reallocates cheap labor from poor to rich countries. Second, multinational corporations tend to hire a large number of migrant workers. In this paper I develop a general...

Why are Multinationals ‘Footloose’?

Conclusions The ‘footloose’ effect of MNE ownership is attributable to the nature of the plants they close. Multinationals are more likely to close plants that are weakest relative to the firm. There is a high degree of similarity between the plants closed by multiplant firms regardless of whether they are MNE or not. However, MNEs offshore high wage plants while domestic multiplant firms outso...

"Towards « Participative » Multinationals"

Trade, Multinationals and Labour

The theory of international trade suggests that free trade will raise national income. It does not, however, suggest that the incomes of all factors of production will rise. Indeed, Stolper and Samuelson (1941) showed that the removal of import barriers could lower the income of the factor of production used relatively intensively in the production of imported products. Therefore, if OECD impor...

Globalisation: Countries, Cities and Multinationals

In this paper we explore the relationship between the size of a country, the size of its cities, and the economic performance of the country. In order to do this we integrate three different literature, namely the literature on optimal country size, literature on historical processes of urbanisation and the performance of cities, and literature on the role of multinational firms in the global e...