TY  - JOUR
AU  - Antràs,Pol
AU  - R.Yeaple,Stephen
TI  - Multinational Firms and the Structure of International Trade
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18775
PY  - 2013
Y2  - February 2013
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18775
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18775.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pol Antràs
Department of Economics
Harvard University
1805 Cambridge Street
Littauer Center 207
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-1236
Fax: 617/495-8570
E-Mail: pantras@fas.harvard.edu

Stephen Yeaple
Department of Economics
The Pennsylvania State University
520 Kern Building
University Park, PA 16802-3306
Tel: 8148655452
E-Mail: sry3@psu.edu
AB  - This article reviews the state of the international trade literature on multinational firms. This literature addresses three main questions. First, why do some firms operate in more than one country while others do not? Second, what determines in which countries production facilities are located? Finally, why do firms own foreign facilities rather than simply contract with local producers or distributors? We organize our exposition of the trade literature on multinational firms around the workhorse monopolistic competition model with constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) preferences. On the theoretical side, we review alternative ways to introduce multinational activity into this unifying framework, illustrating some key mechanisms emphasized in the literature. On the empirical side, we discuss the key studies and provide updated empirical results and further robustness tests using new sources of data.
ER  -