With this paper we present the first microeconometric analysis of the impact of a foreign acquisition on the target firms' access to finance. By using a large database of German firms we furthermore investigate for the first time the link between foreign ownership and access to finance in...

Can multinational firms exert more power than national firms by influencing politics through lobbying? To answer this question, we analyze the extent of national environmental regulation when policy is determined in a lobbying game between a government and firm. We compare the resulting...

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the transmission of international business cycles. I document for the G7 countries between 1991 and 2006 that increases in bilateral FDI linkages are associated with more synchronized investment cycles. I also find that the...

We use a representative sample of German establishments to show that those with foreign ownership are more likely to use performance appraisal, profit sharing and employee share ownership than are those with domestic ownership. Moreover, we show that works councils are associated with an...

We investigate the financial implications of a multinational firm's choice between outsourcing and integration from the perspective of the supplier. Using a simple model, we explore the extent to which an integrated supplier's access to finance, as well as its sources of funding, change relative...

Employees must learn about firm technologies to use them in production. Within multinational firms, knowledge can be acquired centrally, by managers at headquarters, or locally, by production workers. Local knowledge acquisition increases with the bilateral communication costs with central...

By introducing controlled-foreign-corporation (CFC) rules, the parent country of a multinational firm reserves the right to tax the income of the firm's foreign affiliates, if the tax rate in the affiliate's host country is below a specified threshold. In this paper, we identify the conditions...

Multinational companies can exploit the tax advantage of debt more aggressively than national companies. Besides utilizing the standard debt tax shield, multinationals can shift debt from affiliates in low-tax countries to affiliates in high-tax countries. We study the capital structure of...

I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...

This paper looks inside the firm and investigates how trade alters the matching of worker-specific abilities and task-specific requirements. The outcome of this matching depends on how firms organize their recruitment process and how much they invest into the screening of applicants. In the open...