Intrafirm trade and vertical fragmentation in U.S. multinational corporations

By N. Ramondo, Veronica Rappoport, Kim J. Ruhl. 2015

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using firm-level data, we document two new facts regarding intrafirm trade and the activities of the foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational corporations. First, intrafirm trade is concentrated among a small number of large affiliates within large multinational corporations; the median affiliate ships nothing to the rest of the corporation. Second, we find that the input–output coefficient linking the parent's and affiliate's industries of operation — a characteristic commonly associated with production fragmentation — is not related to a corresponding intrafirm flow of goods.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2695ec9c4c510b2a492c2bdf525c9feb04438be