Corporate Growth and FDI: Are Multinationals Stimulating Local Industrial Development?

The aim of this Paper is to improve our understanding of the empirical determinants of corporate growth by extending the literature to include a new group of variables related to FDI, namely the degree of foreign ownership and technology spillovers. Based on recent developments in the field, our analysis takes also into account the role of sunk costs and financial structure, while quantile regression techniques as more suitable to the data available (2640 manufacturing firms operating in Greece in the 1992-97 period) are used. Our findings highlight the role of multinationals in increasing corporate growth with varying intensity depending on industry groups and regression quantiles, and vindicate the use of new variables.