This paper investigates if multinationals influence the political process through lobbying more effectively than national firms. First, I introduce a model which contrasts a multinational’s incentives for lobbying with those of a national firm. Then the effect of lobbying on the political decision is analyzed. I conclude that multinationals have smaller incentives to lobby because they have sma...

This paper focuses on the estimation of three distance-related effects on outward FDI. (i) Distance harms vertical multinationals, since they engage in trade. (ii) It makes non-trading multinationals better off than exporters. (iii) This positive effect on horizontal FDI is expected to rise with bilateral country size due to the home market effect. The use of panel data and related econometric ...

This paper examines the link between multinational enterprises and employment growth at the plantlevel. We investigate in detail the comparative response of multinationals and domestic firms to an economic crisis, using the empirical setting of a well defined case of economic slowdown in Chile as a natural experiment. In our empirical analysis we find that employment growth in manufacturing pla...

Multinational companies have been a force for good but, unfortunately, some misbehave. Our comprehensive literature review on multinationals’ misbehavior reveals three ideas. First, most research focuses the interaction between multinational and its institutional context, but insights vary depending whether drivers of lie inside or outside multinational. Second, we find dearth studies social en...

The US has experienced a sustained increase in productivity growth since the mid-1990s, particularly in sectors that intensively use information technologies (IT). This has not occurred in Europe. If the US “productivity miracle” is due to a natural advantage of being located in the US then we would not expect to see any evidence of it for US establishments located abroad. This paper shows in f...

This paper focuses on the estimation of three distance-related effects on outward foreign direct investment (FDI). (i) Distance harms vertical multinationals, since they engage in trade. (ii) It makes non-trading multinationals better off than exporters. (iii) This positive effect on horizontal FDI is expected to rise with bilateral country size due to the home market effect. The use of panel d...

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. We find that the distributions for multinationals dominate that of domestic exporters and non-exporters, while we do not find clear differences in plant performan...

Existing studies have often failed to find positive impacts of horizontal FDI on domestic firms. We argue that the two effects underpinning the impacts of horizontal FDI (i.e., the positive spillover effect and the negative competition effect) have different degrees of attenuation with geographic distance. As FDI is often distributed unevenly across space, studies that do not account for the ge...