Margins of Multinational Labor Substitution

Marc-Andreas Muendler, Sascha O. Becker

NBER Working Paper No. 14776
Issued in March 2009
NBER Program(s):   ITI   LS

Employment at multinational enterprises (MNEs) responds to wages at the extensive margin, when an MNE enters a foreign location, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates. We present an MNE model and conditions for parametric and nonparametric identification. Prior studies rarely found wages to affect MNE employment. We document a complementarity bias when the extensive margin is excluded and detect salient labor substitution at both margins for German manufacturing MNEs. With a one-percent increase in home wages, for instance, MNEs add 2,000 jobs in Eastern Europe at the extensive margin and 4,000 jobs overall; a converse one-percent drop in Eastern European wages removes 730 German MNE jobs.

(358 K)

Published: Marc-Andreas Muendler & Sascha O. Becker, 2010. "Margins of Multinational Labor Substitution," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(5), pages 1999-2030, December.

This paper is available as PDF (358 K) or via email.

Acknowledgments

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX