Do Multinationals Transplant Their Business Model?
59 Pages Posted: 6 Jun 2013
There are 2 versions of this paper
Do Multinationals Transplant Their Business Model?
Date Written: June 2013
Abstract
What determines whether or not multinational firms transplant their mode of organisation to other countries? We embed the theory of knowledge hierarchies in an industry equilibrium model of monopolistic competition to examine how the economic environment may affect the decision of a multinational firm about transplanting its business organisation to other countries. We test the theory with original and matched parent and affiliate data on the internal organisation of 660 Austrian and German multinational firms and 2200 of their affiliate firms in Eastern Europe. We find that three factors stand out in promoting the multinational firms decision to transplant the business model to the affiliate firm in the host country: a competitive host market, the corporate culture of the multinational firm, and when an innovative technology is transferred to the host country. These factors increase the respective probabilities of organisational transfer by 18.5 percentage points, 37, and 31 percentage points.
Keywords: organisational economics of multinational firms, organisational transfer between countries, the theory of the firm, trade and organisations
JEL Classification: D23, F12, F23, F61
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation