Ownership Chains in Multinational Enterprises

In this contribution, we investigate the role of ownership chains developed by multinational enterprises across different national borders. First, we document that parent companies control a majority (58%) of foreign subsidiaries through indirect control relationships involving at least two countries along an ownership chain. Therefore, we hypothesize that locations along ownership chains are driven by the existence of communication costs to transmit management decisions. In line with motivating evidence, we develop a theoretical model for competition on corporate control that considers the possibility that parent companies in the origin countries can delegate their monitoring activities in final subsidiaries to middlemen subsidiaries that are located in intermediate jurisdictions. Our model returns a two-step empirical strategy with two gravity equations: i) a triangular gravity for establishing a middleman by the parent, conditional on final investments’ locations; ii) a classical gravity for the location of final investments. Estimates confirm the predictions that ease of communication at the country level shapes the heterogeneous locations of subsidiaries along global ownership chains