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Working Paper
Offshore Production and Business Cycle Dynamics with Heterogeneous Firms
To examine the effect of offshoring through vertical FDI on the international transmission of business cycles, I propose a two-country model in which firms endogenously choose the location of their production plants over the business cycle. Firms face a sunk cost to enter the domestic market and an additional fixed cost to produce offshore. As such, the offshoring decision depends on the firm-specific productivity and on fluctuations in the relative cost of effective labor. The model generates a procyclical pattern of offshoring and dynamics along its extensive margin that are consistent with ...
Working Paper
What are the consequences of global banking for the international transmission of shocks?: a quantitative analysis
The global financial crisis of 2008 was followed by a wave of regulatory reforms that affected large banks, especially those with a global presence. These reforms were reactive to the crisis. In this paper we propose a structural model of global banking that can be used proactively to perform counterfactual analysis on the effects of alternative regulatory policies. The structure of the model mimics the US regulatory framework and highlights the organizational choices that banks face when entering a foreign market: branching versus subsidiarization. When calibrated to match moments from a ...
Working Paper
On the Origins of the Multinational Premium
How do foreign direct investment (FDI) dynamics relate to the risk premium of a firm? To answer this question, we compare the stock returns of US firms with different FDI and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) exposure to study the evolution of stock returns as firms expand into foreign markets. We document three empirical regularities. First, there are cross-sectional risk premia associated with both multinational activity and mergers and acquisitions. Second, firm-level stock returns decline when a firm undertakes M&A activity and with merger deepening. Third, future multinational acquirers ...
Working Paper
The Channels of International Comovement
How does exposure to international markets affect returns and cash flow comovements? Foreign bond owners, lenders, affiliates, investors, customers, and suppliers all transmit country shocks to companies. Most multinationals have many of these exposures simultaneously within the same foreign market. Returns and cash flows of two companies comove when exposed to the same country through the same channel. Within-country exposure through different channels is generally associated with lower comovement, in line with an operational hedging strategy. This evidence can help reconcile how, on ...
Working Paper
Multinational firms' entry and productivity: some aggregate implications of firm-level heterogeneity
Despite the microeconomic evidence supporting the superior idiosyncratic productivity of multinational firms (MNFs) and their affiliates, cross-country studies fail to find robust evidence of a positive relationship between foreign direct investment and growth. In order to study the aggregate implications of MNFs entry and production, I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with firm heterogeneity where MNFs sort according to their own productivity. The entry and production of MNFs contribute to aggregate productivity growth at decreasing rates and affect domestic producers through ...
Working Paper
The few leading the many: foreign affiliates and business cycle comovement
This paper uses microdata on balance sheets, trade, and the nationality of ownership of firms in France to investigate the effect of foreign multinationals on business cycle comovement. We first show that foreign affiliates, which represent a tiny fraction of all firms, are responsible for a high share of employment, value added, and trade both at the national and at the regional levels. We also show that the distribution of foreign affiliates across regions differs with the nationality of the parent. We then show that foreign affiliates increase the comovement of activities between their ...
Working Paper
FDI and the task content of domestic employment for U.S. multinationals
Using a unique dataset, we examine how the foreign direct investment activities of U.S. multinational manufacturers are related to the composition of their domestic employment. The analysis is based on a dataset in which Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) firm-level data on the foreign operations of U.S. multinationals are matched with Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) establishment-level data on occupation and wage distributions. The main implication of our findings is that foreign direct investment is generally positively correlated with domestic labor demand, with automated/routine tasks ...
Working Paper
Benefits of foreign ownership: evidence from foreign direct investment in china
To examine the effect of foreign direct investment, this paper compares the post-acquisition performance changes of foreign- and domestic-acquired firms in China. Unlike previous studies, we investigate the purified effect of foreign ownership by using domestic-acquired firms as the control group. After controlling for the acquisition effect that also exists in domestic acquisitions, we find no evidence in the data that foreign ownership can bring productivity gains to target firms. In contrast, a strong and robust finding is that foreign ownership significantly improves target firms' ...
Working Paper
Vertical integration and supplier finance
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 to a firm supplying a multinational at arm's-length. The model predicts that integrated firms have better access to finance and cover a larger share of their costs using internal funds. Furthermore, improvements in a host country's level of financial development have less of an impact on the financial ...
Working Paper
Exporting and Pollution Abatement Expenditure: Evidence from Firm-Level Data
The relevance of analyzing whether exporting firms engage in greater pollution abatement cannot be overemphasized. For instance, the question relates to the possibility of export promotion policies being environmentally beneficial. In fact, the issue is especially relevant for developing countries typically characterized by ineffective environmental regulation. However, despite the significance of the topic, the extant literature examining the environmental consequences of firm-level trade is skewed toward developed countries. Moreover, the existing contributions rarely attend to concerns ...