Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author. The organizational theory of the multinational firm holds that foreignness is a liability, and specifically that lack of embeddedness in host-country social ne...

Article history: Received 8 January 2008 Accepted 18 December 2008 Available online 24 June 2009 Over the past two decades, there has been a substantial shift in the global innovation landscape. Multinationals from developed economies are increasingly globalizing their R&D activities and are developing an “open innovation” model to source innovations from outside the firm, including from emergi...

This paper first reviews the evolution of China’s IPR system with an emphasis on the patent system, which is mainly shaped by three forces including the transition to a market economy, the opening of the domestic market and the national initiatives for cultivating indigenous innovative capabilities. Then by using some unique data both at the national level and firm level, it analyses the patent...

Spillovers Through Backward Linkages from Multinationals: Measurement Matters! We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported inputs, (ii) multinati...

Multinational companies from emerging economies are becoming significant players in the globalized world economy. As the volume of foreign direct investment from emerging economies is rising, and emerging multinationals increasingly seek access to markets and assets in advanced developed economies, the host governments feel the need to define their responses and policies. The European Union is ...

International strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&As) by emerging market multinationals (EMMs) are rapidly gaining importance. Whereas multinational firms from developed countries mostly invest abroad to leverage their existing assets, EMMs tend to seek strategic assets when investing in other countries. We examine the effect of M&As on the performance of acquired firms for 88 inbound M&As in...

A number of theoretical studies have predicted that preferential trade agreements (PTAs) raise outside multinationals’ incentive to invest in the participating countries, especially in those that are integrated with larger markets and have lower production costs. The hypothesis has, however, not been tested empirically. This paper addresses the issue by estimating the impact of PTAs on countrie...

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...

In light of emerging-market multinationals’ substantial engagement in strategic asset-seeking internationalization, this study explores the effects home-country political ties on innovativeness and reverse innovation transfer Chinese multinationals. Based a survey 99 multinationals their 177 subsidiaries, results reveal that headquarters’ hamper innovativeness, an important factor stimulating s...

This paper makes a case for the value of looking at culture and multinationals from a management and organizational perspective because it is one which could direct greater attention towards culture as a significant factor in future investigation on multinational corporations. We attempt to illustrate that multinationals are fundamentally multicultural units in more ways than one. This paper is...