Multinational Enterprises, International Trade, and Productivity Growth: Firm-Level Evidence from the United States

By Wolfgang Keller, S. Yeaple. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2003

1,031 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We estimate international technology spillovers to U.S. manufacturing firms via imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) between 1987 and 1996. In contrast to earlier work, our results suggest that FDI leads to substantial productivity gains for domestic firms. The size of FDI spillovers is economically important, accounting for about 14 of productivity growth in U.S. firms between 1987 and 1996. FDI spillovers are particularly strong in high-tech sectors, whereas they are largely absent in low-tech sectors. Small firms with low productivity benefit more from FDI spillovers than larger productivity firms with more productivity do. The evidence for import spillovers is much weaker.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/383f24b5db8fad0a70f9096c893fd31faee4e91a

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Citations in the corpus

Neighbors and the evolution of the comparative advantage of nations: Evidence of international knowledge diffusion? (2014, positive): “Keller and Yeaple (2009) find strong evidence of inward FDI on the productivity of US firms, especially in high-tech industries.”
International business travel: an engine of innovation? (2014, positive): “This result is along earlier findings that foreign direct investment triggers technology spillovers for domestic firms primarily in high-technology industries (Keller and Yeaple 2009).”
Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production (2012, neutral): “selection + P i(sit st)( it t) reallocation : (33)”
Determinants of total factor productivity : a literature review (2007, neutral): “Keller and Yeaple (2003), studying plants in the U.S. (1987-1996), find a strong link between FDI and growth.”
The globalization of technology in emerging markets: a gravity model on the determinants of international patent collaborations (2013, positive): “In the latter, knowledge is transferred through the movement of R&D facilities from advanced countries (Keller and Yeaple, 2009b).”