It is well known that the performance of foreign firms compared to domestic companies is superior with respect to employment, wages, and productivity. In this paper we detail the export behaviour of foreign affiliates in the United Kingdom relative to indigenous firms. Our findings show that foreign firms are more likely to export, and when they do so they are more export intensive and overall ...

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...

Are firms born Global? Because knowledge spillovers that lead to new venture creation are geographically constrained we believe that firms are born local. It follows that the decision to create sustainable new ventures is independent from the decision to internationalize, even if that is the ultimate goal of the firm. We explore two avenues to internationalize new ventures, a direct path descri...

Multinational companies can shift profit and income between branches in order to reduce the overall tax liabilities of the company. The result is a tax competition between countries. In this paper we consider the sequential choice of tax rates to illustrate the potential effects of tax leadership. We use a profit shifting model with multinational firms that operate in two countries, large and s...

This paper examines one of the basic tenets of UK industrial policy, that attracting inward investment into the UK stimulates domestic productivity growth. A model of productivity growth is developed for the indigenous sector of UK manufacturing, linking domestic productivity growth to theoretical explanations of inward investment. The paper demonstrates that inward investment does stimulate pr...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between economic growth and industrial pollution emissions in China using data for 112 major cities between 2001 and 2004. Using disaggregated data we separate FDI inflows from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan from those of other foreign economies. We examine four industrial water pollution indicators (wastewater, chemical oxygen demand, hexavalent chrom...

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 ...