We merge German balance-of-payments and foreign-affiliate-trade statistics to obtain data about trade in commercial services at the firm level. We use these data to study export market participation and the choice of export mode: cross-border versus foreign-affiliate sales. We find that for...

International agreements increasingly constrain the ability of governments to use trade policies whereas few constraints apply to the use of investment policies. Using a model in which a local and a foreign firm compete in the domestic market, we analyse whether the foreign firm may be forced to...

This Paper extends the theory of multinational corporations, identifying three distinct influences of internal trade liberalization by a group of countries on the level and pattern of inward foreign direct investment (FDI). First, the tariff-jumping motive encourages plant consolidation. Second,...

Oligopoly is empirically prevalent in the industries where MNEs operate and national governments compete with fiscal inducements for their FDI projects. Despite this, existing formal treatments of fiscal competition generally focus on the polar cases of perfect competition and monopoly. We...

We examine the economic justification for providing investment subsidies to foreign-owned multinationals. These provide employment opportunities and generate demand for domestic intermediate inputs, produced by domestic workers with increasing returns to scale. Offering subsidies to...

This Paper estimates the cross-price elasticity of exports with respect to investment costs for bilateral relations between 36 countries. We show that the effect of reducing foreign direct investment costs on exports depends on country characteristics and trade costs as predicted by the Markusen...

Intuition suggests that the international distribution of firm ownership ought to affect tax/subsidy competition for mobile plants. One might expect that the greater the share of a firm owned within a potential host country that offers a relatively profitable production location, the more that...

The global pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI) is quite similar to the world trade pattern. In particular, intra-industry FDI between rich nations is almost as pervasive as intra-industry trade among rich nations. In the ‘standard’ multinational corporation (MNC) model (of Markusen,...

Models dealing with cross-border acquisitions versus greenfield investment usually assume that the entry of a foreign firm into a market has effects on the outputs of all domestic firms in that market, but exit or entry of local firms is not considered. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine...