NBER Publications by Maggie Chen

Quantifying the gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to knowledge spillover from multinational to domestic firms. An alternative, less stressed explanation is …rm selection whereby competition from multinationals leads to market reallocation and survival of only the most productive domestic firms. We develop a model that incorporates both aspects and identify their relative importance in the gains from multinational production by exploring their distinct predictions on domestic productivity and revenue distributions. We show that knowledge spillover shifts both distributions rightward while selection and reallocation raise the left truncation of the distributions and shift revenue leftward. Using a...

We examine the differential response of establishments to the recent global financial crisis with particular emphasis on the role of foreign ownership. Using a worldwide establishment panel dataset, we investigate how multinational subsidiaries around the world responded to the crisis relative to local establishments. We find that, first, multinational subsidiaries fared on average better than local counterfactuals with similar economic characteristics. Second, among multinational subsidiaries, establishments sharing stronger vertical production and financial linkages with parents exhibited greater resilience. Finally, in contrast to the crisis period, the effect of foreign ownership and linkages on establishment performance was insignificant in non-crisis years.

The explosion of multinational activities in recent decades is rapidly transforming the global landscape of industrial production. But are the emerging clusters of multinational production the rule or the exception? What drives the offshore agglomeration of multinational firms? Using a unique worldwide plant-level dataset that reports detailed location, ownership, and operation information for plants in over 100 countries, we construct a spatially continuous index of agglomeration and investigate the patterns and determinants underlying the global economic geography of multinational firms. Our analysis shows that the emerging offshore clusters of multinationals are not a simple reflection of domestic industrial clusters. Location fundamentals including market access and comparative advanta...