This paper examines the production strategies of an international firm. We show that foreign direct investment acts as a signal to overcome an asymmetric information problem in the host-country. We find that a host-country will prefer a situation where a technologically superior (inferior) firm...

Recent theoretical research shows that exporters are more productive than nonexporters. We show that this result holds almost trivially for the case of constant marginal cost of production, as mainly assumed in the literature, but it may not hold true if the marginal cost is not constant. Our...

While the “proximity-concentration” theory suggests a positive relationship between trade cost and foreign direct investment (FDI), there is ample evidence showing a negative relationship between them. We show that the possibility of exporting back to the home country from a host country,...

We examine the effects of unionization in the host country on a firm's choices of entry mode when serving a foreign market, i.e., its incentives for exporting, green-field FDI and merger. If, due to government regulations the merged firm must operate a plant in the host country, we find that the...