We investigate whether government subsidies to local input manufacturers encourage procurement from foreign firms. We use a comprehensive panel data of Irish firms from 1983 until 2002. Our data shows a spontaneity about linkages and relative insensitivity to grant aid, although it may be the...

This paper examines the effect of the presence of multinational companies on plant survival in the host country. We postulate that multinational companies can impact positively on plant survival through technology spillovers. We study the nature of the effect of multinationals using a Cox...

This paper presents an empirical study of the effect of foreign multinational companies on the development of indigenous firms in the host country, using data for the Irish manufacturing sector. Our starting point is a recent paper by Markusen and Venables (1999) that shows formally that...

This paper analyses the impact of foreign multinationals on the development of start-up size of new entrants in Irish manufacturing industries over the period 1973 to 1996. We provide a theoretical rationale as to why we would expect an effect of multinationals on entrants’ start-up size. In...

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. We find that the distributions for multinationals dominate...

This paper examines whether multinational companies are more footloose than their domestic counterparts in the host country, using data for the Irish manufacturing sector. First, we investigate whether survival rates differ between multinationals and indigenous plants. Second, we analyse whether...

We study the regional location of multinationals in Ireland since the 1970s by focusing on the role played by agglomeration economies and public incentives intent on dispersing industrial activity to the more disadvantaged areas of Ireland. We find that regional policy has only been effective in...

We argue that the measures of backward linkages used in recent papers on spillovers from multinational companies are potentially problematic, as they depend on a number of restrictive assumptions, namely that (i) multinationals use domestically produced inputs in the same proportion as imported...