Productivity and the sourcing modes of multinational firms: evidence from French firm-level data
Fabrice Defever and
Farid Toubal
LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library
Abstract:
We investigate the role of a firm’s total factor productivity in its decision to import from their affiliates rather than from independent input suppliers. We propose a slightly modified version of the Antràs and Helpman (2004) model. We assume higher fixed costs under outsourcing and a firm-specific production function. We use detailed French firm-level data that provides a geographical breakdown of French firms’ import at product level and their sourcing modes in 1999. We find strong empirical support for the theoretical predictions of the model. In particular, high-productivity firms that have a production process intensive in suppliers’ inputs source their inputs through independent foreign suppliers.
Keywords: Productivity; Incomplete Contracts; Intra-firm Trade; Outsourcing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F23 L22 L23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2007-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)
Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/19655/ Open access version. (application/pdf)
Related works:
Working Paper: Productivity and the Sourcing Modes of Multinational Firms: Evidence from French Firm-Level Data (2007) 
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:ehl:lserod:19655
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().