Given the level of its production in the U.S., a firm that produces more abroad tends to have fewer employees in the U.S. and to pay slightly higher salaries and wages to them. The most likely explanation seems to be that the larger a firm's foreign production, the greater its ability to...

Multinational firms have played an important role in leading the developing countries into world markets. Multinationals from the United States, Japan and Sweden have all increased their shares of LDC exports of manufactures since the mid-1960s or mid-1970s. Their importance was particularly...

This paper reviews the International Comparison Program (ICP), a worldwide effort to produce international comparisons of real GDP and its components and purchasing power parities of currencies (PPPs). The robustness of results and future work are considered.A generous estimate of margins of...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relations among characteristics of U.S. firms, their tendency to invest abroad, and their choice of production locations. The larger the firm, and the higher its profitability, capital intensity, technological Intensity, and the skill level ofits labor...

This paper examines changes in national price levels and prices of tradables and nontradables and relates them to changes in variables found earlier to be associated with price level differences among countries. Across countries, national price levels increase systematically with the level of a...

We use new international price measures we have developed for machinery and transport equipment to explain changes in exports and export shares of the United States, Germany, and Japan. The effects of relative price changes on export shares are fairly large, producing relative quantity changes...

The purpose of this paper is to present, and to explain the construction of, a set of price indexes relating to international trade in manufactured goods. These include: 1. Indexes of export prices for the U.S., Germany, and Japan, based on their weights, and indexes of competitors' prices for...

U.S.-owned manufacturing affiliates in foreign countries tended to become more export-oriented between 1966 and 1977. The shift toward exporting characterized affiliates in most industries and most countries.The bulk of U.S.-owned production abroad continues to be for local sale in most...

The purpose of this paper is to call attention to the need for a theory of comparative national price levels and to explore some of the elements that seem to belong to such a theory. Most theoretical discussions have maintained that national price levels tend towards equality and focus on...

The location of overseas manufacturing production by U.S. firms seems to have been strongly influenced by common factors that operate in all industries: notably proximity to the United States and to other markets. Within industries, the choices made by parent firms among locations appear to show...