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 ...

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one of the leading actors on the world market for goods. In line with theoretical predictions we find that...

This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and the productivity of domestic firms. Using a specially designed survey on a sample of over 7,500 manufacturing firms in Vietnam we uncover some of the mechanisms that explain productivity spillovers from FDI through vertical linkages along the supply chain. Our results suggest that domestic firms exp...

Using patent citations as a proxy for the influence of foreign technology on French firms’ patents, this paper finds that the inventions of importers are significantly more likely to be influenced by foreign technology than are the inventions of firms that do not import. Furthermore, importers’ citations increase relative to similar firms after they start importing. Exporting, in contrast, is n...

Despite the increasing scope for transactional approaches to corporate political activity (CPA) in emerging markets and rising concerns about the use of relational approaches, foreign firms in emerging economies appear to be reluctant to adopt transactional approaches to CPA. Using Resource Dependence theory we argue that criticality of resources, product diversification, integration with other...

Why Do Foreign-Owned Firms Pay More? The Role of On-the-Job Training Foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers in both developed and developing countries alike. Although a number of studies have documented and some attempted to explain this stylized fact, the issue still remains unresolved. In a multi...

Using firm-level census data, this paper examines the spillover effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic firms in the Chinese manufacturing industry between 2000 and 2003. We find that FDI has a significant positive spillover on industry productivity that decreases as the share of FDI in the industry increases. These positive spillovers are more likely to occur through forward lin...

Using a panel of 21,582 Chinese firms over the period 2000-2005, we examine the relationship between the degree of foreign ownership and corporate performance in recipient firms. We find that foreign ownership is positively associated with firms’ return on assets, return on sales, labor productivity, and total factor productivity. Yet, the relationship exhibits an inverted U-shaped pattern: cor...

Financing Decisions of Firms and Central Bank Policy* This Paper aims to explain the sharp rise in unhedged foreign borrowing by South East Asian corporations in the few years prior to the crisis despite remarkably little change in fundamentals. The crucial element of our story is the complementarity between decisions of firms and of the central bank, which gives rise to multiple equilibria: wh...

While most advocate that foreign firms should utilize managerial ties to conduct business in China, recent literature cautions that such ties may offer only conditional value. This study examines three sources of heterogeneity that may condition the value of ties: firm ownership (foreign vs. domestic), competition, and structural uncertainty. Results from a survey of 280 firms in China indicate...