The Scope, Scale and Locational Preferences of Spanish Multinationals

Las decisiones de localización, alcance y escala de las empresas multinacionales españolas

Carolina Mainer-Casado (), Jose C. Fariñas () and Lourdes Moreno
Additional contact information
Carolina Mainer-Casado: Departamento de Economía Aplicada II (Estructura Económica y Economía Industrial). Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

No 18-02, Documentos de trabajo de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales

Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between firms’ heterogeneity and their multinational activity. We examine the scope and the scale of multinational firms following the insights of Yeaple’s (2009) model. The goal of the paper is to contribute to a better understanding of the activity of Spanish multinationals using a sample of Spanish multinational firms. Our dataset is built from two databases, SABI and ORBIS, both from the Bureau van Dijk. Our results confirm that more productive firms have a greater multinational activity in terms of both the scope (the number of foreign markets where they invest) and the scale (the volume of local sales by subsidiaries in foreign markets). The structure of Spanish multinational firms’ activity is also analysed from the perspective of host country characteristics (GDP, population, distance and language) using standard gravity equations. Country characteristics that are positively associated (GDP and common language) with the volume of multinational activity are negatively related to the productivity of firms that go abroad. This asymmetry also holds for bilateral characteristics as distance that appears negatively associated with the level of multinational activity.

Keywords: Multinational Firms; Heterogeneity; Productivity.; Empresas multinacionales; Heterogeneidad; Productividad. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F23 L25 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://eprints.ucm.es/id/eprint/47151/1/1802.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Scope, Scale and Locational Preferences of Spanish Multinationals (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucm:doctra:18-02

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales. Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 - POZUELO DE ALARCÓN (MADRID)
https://economicasye ... /working-papers-ccee

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos de trabajo de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales from Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Águeda González Abad ().