The dominant neo-liberal policy community holds that a reduction in employment rights and social protection is likely to promote economic recovery and growth. It has been suggested that investors are likely to shun countries where such rights are strong; in contrast, radical labour market deregulation is seen as encouraging both local business and multinationals to invest. This study explores w...

We examine the importance of societal embeddedness and universal contingencies in the organizational practices at the international level of multinational enterprises, based on a study comparing European (Finnish, French, German, Dutch, Swiss, Swedish, British), American and Japanese multinational enterprises. Although multinationals are highly internationalized by definition, our study shows t...

using firm-level panel data for korean mnes, we make a distinction between being the only affiliate of a parent firm and being the one of the multiple affiliates of a parent firm. comparisons of correlations between purchases and sales of each group of the foreign affiliates show distinctive difference in the motivations of fdi and the multinational activities, due to the difference in the numb...

In this paper we analyse the impact of governmental grant provision on plant performance. To this end we utilise rich information derived from three data sources for the manufacturing sector in Ireland, where grant provision has been an important part of the industrial policy. We use a matching technique combined with a difference-in-differences estimator in the empirical analysis. Our results ...

Undertaking foreign direct investment (FDI) is the defining feature of multinational enterprises (MNEs). While emerging economies as recipients of FDI are familiar with MNEs, these MNEs tend to be firms from the developed world. A new breed of home-grown MNEs has now arisen from the emerging economies, in particular the group known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). In this article, th...

This paper presents evidence on whether multinationals are flocking to developing country "pollution havens". We begin with data from four developing countries, examining the pattern of foreign investment in Mexico, Venezuela, Morocco and Cote d'Ivoire. We find almost no evidence that foreign investors are concentrated in "dirty" sectors. We then examine the behavior of multinationals located i...

Abstract We investigate the existence of local (within-country) and global (between-country) knowledge spillovers within a single analytical framework by considering specifically the role of agglomeration economies in fostering interactions between these two types of externalities. Our study is based on a database of Irish manufacturing foreign multinational and domestic plants covering the per...

This paper explains how multinationals source specific tacit and sticky technical knowledge in industrial districts through recruiting. Focusing on the location of textile-dedicated company ZARA a footwear-dedicated Marshallian district, we study its recruiting strategy using mixed methods. recruits district footwear expertise by seeking primarily local workers with strong relational ties inten...