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...

While there has been a large empirical literature on productivity spillovers from multinationals this literature treats the channels through which these spillover effects work as a black box. The innovation of this paper is to investigate whether spillovers occur via worker mobility. We use data...

This paper investigates the link between nationality of ownership and wage elasticities of labour demand at the level of the plant. In particular, we examine whether labour demand in multinationals becomes less elastic with respect to the wage if the plant has backward linkages with the local...

Many previous studies have shown that the localisation of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

We study the coagglomeration of domestic plants and foreign multinationals and the impact of this on domestic plant growth using data for Irish manufacturing. To this end we make use of the index developed by Ellison and Glaeser (1997) and find coagglomeration to be important for a number of...

This Paper presents an empirical study of the effect of foreign multinational companies on the development of indigenous firms in the host country. Our starting point is a recent paper by Markusen and Venables (1999) that shows formally that multinationals, through the creation of linkages with...

Many previous studies have shown that the localization of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

According to the ‘convergence hypothesis’, multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998)...

While foreign-owned firms have consistently been found to pay higher wages than domestic firms to what appear to be equally productive workers, the causes of this remain unresolved. In a two-period bargaining framework we show that if training is more productive and specific in foreign firms,...