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...

We incorporate trade in tasks l a Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) into the international trade theory of fi rm organization of Marin and Verdier (2012) to examine how off shoring aff ects the way fi rms organize. We test the predictions of the model based on firm level data of 660 Austrian...