Global firms

Blog

VoxEU:

Firms slice up global production to protect their knowhow

Imitation is a first-order concern for enterprises operating global production processes. Firms routinely source knowledge-intensive inputs from many countries, including those with weak intellectual property laws. This ...Read more...

Peter Eppinger, Bohdan Kukharskyy, Alireza Naghavi and Gianmarco Ottaviano

17 August 2026

Journal article

Spatial Economic Analysis:

Digital network centrality and the structure of goods trade

This paper studies how digital infrastructure is associated with the spatial structure of international trade in goods. We embed data availability into a structural gravity framework, conceptualising it as an information...Read more...

Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

11 March 2026

Journal article

Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization:

Business groups as knowledge-based hierarchies of firms

We provide the first worldwide overview of the patterns of hierarchical differentiation across Business Groups (BGs), highlighting the coexistence of different hierarchical shapes. We show how the different shapes can ar...Read more...

Carlo Altomonte, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Armando Rungi and Tommaso Sonno

10 March 2026

CEP discussion paper

Accommodating emerging giants in the global economy

How has aggregate income and welfare in the United States been affected by globalization and rapid productivity growth in emerging economies? We use the class of constant elasticity trade models to provide quantitative e...Read more...

Zhuokai Huang, Benny Kleinman, Ernest Liu and Stephen J. Redding

27 November 2025

CentrePiece article

Deglobalisation in disguise?

Brexit means that UK exporters of services now face more red tape and fewer opportunities....Read more...

Danyal Arnold, Shania Bhalotia and Swati Dhingra

21 October 2025

Blog

Vox Dev:

When progress divides: Are multinational enterprises fuelling conflict in Africa?

New evidence using geo-referenced data across the African continent suggests that the arrival of multinational enterprises can fuel local conflicts....Read more...

Tommaso Sonno

20 May 2025

External report

Foreign Direct Investment

Multinational enterprises are at the centre of policy debates in low- and middle-income countries. As some of the most productive and innovative firms in the world, which are at the core of global supply chains, multinat...Read more...

Vanessa Alviarez, Laura Boudreau, Evangelina Dardati, Jingting Fan, Farid Farrokhi, Ezequiel Garcia-Lembergman, Stefania Garetto, Grace Gu, Galina Hale, David Hemous, Nicola Limodio, Pierre Louis Vezina, Isabela Manelici, Ralf Martin, Nicolas Morales, Nitya Pandalai-Nayar, Nina Pavcnik, Heitor Pellegrina, Natalia Ramondo and Jose P Vasquez

12 February 2025

Blog

EGC Voices in Development:

Development Dialogue: How can emerging economies break free from the sidelines of global trade? (podcast)

This episode of Development Dialogues addresses how lower-income countries have engaged with global trade. How have their approaches to trade differed based on their underlying institutional and economic structure? What ...Read more...

Amit Khandelwal, Isabela Manelici and Arvind Subramanian

17 December 2024

Blog

Vox EU:

High moments for superstar exporters

Aggregate exports are highly concentrated in a small group of firms, which are generally more productive than other firms. This column shows that productivity shocks generate different responses of aggregate exports depe...Read more...

Giorgio Barba Navaretti, Matteo Bugamelli, Emanuele Forlani and Gianmarco Ottaviano

16 December 2024

Blog

LSE Business Review:

Joining multinationals' supply chains can benefit domestic firms' performance

Developing countries compete to attract multinationals to induce development. Becoming suppliers to multinationals could improve domestic firms' technology and managerial practices, and the host country's economy could b...Read more...

Alonso Alfaro-Urena, Isabela Manelici and Jose P Vasquez

21 November 2023

Blog

Trade Talks:

Industrial policy and the rise of Romania's Silicon Valley (podcast)

In 2001, Romania gave an income tax break to a select group of software programmers. Isabela Manelici explains how this particular industrial policy helped stem Romania's "brain drain" problem, transformed the country's ...Read more...

Isabela Manelici

9 July 2023

Blog

Economics Observatory:

How has the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected global financial markets?

As Russia's war against Ukraine continues to unfold, its global economic impact remains uncertain. Evidence from the stock market indicates that firms with strong trade or ownership ties to Russia are more likely to face...Read more...

Marcus Biermann and Elsa Leromain

25 May 2023

Blog

Vox EU:

Responsible sourcing: Theory and evidence from Costa Rica

There is growing pressure on multinational enterprises to implement 'responsible sourcing' requirements for their suppliers in low- and middle-income countries. These include minimum standards on working conditions, such...Read more...

Alonso Alfaro-Urena, Benjamin Faber, Cecile Gaubert, Isabela Manelici and Jose P Vasquez

20 December 2022

Journal article

Journal of Political Economy:

The comparative advantage of firms

Resource-based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products that use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common-input capabilities, using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...

Johannes Boehm, Swati Dhingra and John Morrow

1 December 2022

Blog

Vox EU:

How US sanctions increased the economic activity of sanctioned Russian firms

Dzhamilya Nigmatulina assesses the impact of sanctions following the 2014 annexation of Crimea on Russian sanctioned firms. The capital, materials inputs, and revenue of sanctioned firms actually increased relative to no...Read more...

Dzhamilya Nigmatulina

19 November 2022

Blog

Vox EU:

Service offshoring and export experience

Trade in services is important but difficult to measure. This column introduces a new dataset that helps understand the contribution of services to global value chains and their role in the process of exporting goods. Fi...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Luca Marcolin and Emanuel Ornelas

28 July 2021

CEP discussion paper

Service offshoring and export experience

Service inputs are a key component of the costs of exporting, and contribute to explain the process of internationalization of firms. A new dataset on the participation of French firms in global value chains reveals that...Read more...

Giuseppe Berlingieri, Luca Marcolin and Emanuel Ornelas

3 June 2021

Journal article

The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization:

In-house and arms length: productivity heterogeneity and variation in organizational form

This paper analyzes firm boundaries in the US hotel industry. Hotel properties of a given brand are often managed either by a chain employee or by a franchisee. We document that brand properties with the lowest and the h...Read more...

Arturs Kalnins, Stephen F. Lin and Catherine Thomas

1 November 2020

Journal article

The Review of Economics and Statistics:

Product mix and firm productivity responses to trade competition

We document how demand shocks in export markets lead French multi-product exporters to re-allocate the mix of products sold in those destinations. In response to positive demand shocks, French firms skew their export sal...Read more...

Thierry Mayer, Marc J. Melitz and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

1 August 2020

CEP discussion paper

Rising protectionism and global value chains: quantifying the general equilibrium effects

Quantifying the effects of trade policy in the age of ?global value chains? (GVCs) requires an enhanced analytical framework that takes the observed international input-output relations in due account. However, existing ...Read more...

Rita Cappariello, Sebastian Franco-Bedoya, Vanessa Gunnella and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

26 March 2020

CEP discussion paper

Intellectual property and the organization of the global value chain

This paper introduces the concept of intangible assets in a property rights model of sequential supply chains. Firms transmit knowledge to their suppliers to facilitate input customization. Yet, to avoid knowledge dissip...Read more...

Stefano Bolatto, Alireza Naghavi, Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Katja Zajc Kejzar

21 January 2020

CEP discussion paper

The comparative advantage of firms

Resource based theories propose that firms grow by diversifying into products which use common capabilities. We provide evidence for common input capabilities using a policy that removed entry barriers in input markets t...Read more...

Johannes Boehm, Swati Dhingra and John Morrow

17 April 2019

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy:

From selling goods to selling services: firm responses to trade liberalization

In this paper, we focus on a new channel of adaptation to trade liberalization , namely the shift toward increased provision of services in lieu of goods production. We exploit variation in European Union trade policy to...Read more...

Holger Breinlich, Anson Soderbery and Greg C. Wright

1 November 2018

CEP discussion paper

Global banking: risk taking and competition

Direct involvement of global banks in local retail activities can reduce risk-taking by promoting local competition. We develop this argument through a model in which multinational banks operate simultaneously in differe...Read more...

Ester Faia and Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano

27 March 2017

CentrePiece article

Sequential exporting: how firms break into foreign markets

Many countries are looking to their export sectors as a source of future growth, but how do domestic companies make a success of selling their output abroad? Research by Emanuel Ornelas and colleagues finds evidence of '...Read more...

Facundo Albornoz, Hector Calvo-Pardo, Gregory Corcos and Emanuel Ornelas

16 February 2012