TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alfaro,Laura
AU  - Chen,Maggie
TI  - The Global Agglomeration of Multinational Firms
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15576
PY  - 2009
Y2  - December 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15576
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15576.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Laura Alfaro
Harvard Business School
Morgan Hall 263
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-7981
Fax: 617/496-5985
E-Mail: lalfaro@hbs.edu

Maggie Chen
Dept. of Economics
George Washington University
2115 G ST, NW, #367
Washington, DC 20052
Tel: 202-994-0192
E-Mail: xchen@gwu.edu
AB  - 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 advantage and under-emphasized agglomeration economies including capital-good market externality and technology diffusion play a particularly important role in multinationals'’ offshore agglomeration.
ER  -