This paper investigates the structure of firms’ outward FDI and their behaviour at home in both manufacturing and business services sectors. UK multinationals with overseas affiliates in low-wage economies invest simultaneously in a large number of high-wage countries. I find that more productive multinationals operate in a greater number of countries, consistent with their being able to bear t...

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. Comparing the cumulative distributions of the measures of plant performance across the three types of plants we find that the distributions for multinationals dom...

This paper seeks to identify the causal effect of foreign acquisitions on wages of skilled and unskilled workers, using difference-in-differences propensity score matching estimators. Our results suggest that there is substantial heterogeneity in the post-acquisition wage effect depending on the nationality of the foreign acquirer and the skill group of workers. We find sizable post acquisition...

This paper investigates the structure of firms’ outward FDI and their behaviour at home in both manufacturing and business services sectors. UK multinationals with overseas affiliates in low-wage economies invest simultaneously in a large number of high-wage countries. I find that more productive multinationals operate in a greater number of countries, consistent with their being able to bear t...

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...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of acquisition FDI on exporting intensity in U.K manufacturing. A quasi-likelihood estimation method is used, and the empirical estimates point to the following conclusions: (i) UK firms with higher exporting intensity are more likely to be foreign takeover targets; (ii) US acquired firms increase their exporting intensity, consistent with the idea that acquis...

It has recently been shown that the firm size distribution is initially skewed to the right and then evolves over time to become more lognormal, and argued that this is likely due to firms initially facing financial constraints, see Cabral and Mata(2003). We conjecture that, if this is true, then such a pattern should be much less apparent for multinational companies for which financial constra...

I n the last decade, emerging markets have become a significant feature of the world economy. The allure of vast new markets for growth along with fresh opportunities for low cost offshoring have goaded droves of global corporations to invest in emerging markets. In 2012, global corporations invested more in emerging markets than in the core economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan (Ra...