Foreign sales strategies of multinational enterprises

Joern Kleinert () and Farid Toubal

No 327, Tübinger Diskussionsbeiträge from University of Tübingen, School of Business and Economics

Abstract: The business literature has long recognized the importance of multinationals' distribution networks. The empirical analysis of distribution-oriented FDI has, however, received little attention which is at least partly due to the lack of appropriate data. We outline a slightly modified version of Helpman, Melitz, and Yeaple (2004) that explicitly models the possibility for a multinational firm to export through its wholesale trade affiliate in order to analyze multinational firms' choice between foreign production and foreign distribution. The subsequent empirical analysis uses different discrete choice models. We use alternative specifications and report estimation results for several sub-samples of multinational firms. We also consider more complex foreign sales strategies and correct for the sample selection bias that arises because we only observe firms that have foreign affiliates. Our results show that the decision between distribution and production-oriented FDI is based on the trade-off between fixed and variable costs.

Keywords: Multinational firms; Wholesale sales; Discrete choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 F12 F23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/40296/1/623973642.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:tuedps:327

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tübinger Diskussionsbeiträge from University of Tübingen, School of Business and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().