Multinational Production and Innovation in Tandem
Ms. Jin Liu
Ph.D. Candidate of Economics
New York University
Multinational firms colocate production and innovation by offshoring them to the same host country or region. In this paper, I examine the determinants of multinational firms’ production and innovation locations. I find complementarities between production and innovation within host countries and regions, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in tariffs. To evaluate manufacturing reshoring policies, I develop a quantifiable multicountry offshoring location choice model. I allow for rich colocation benefits and cross-country interdependence and prove supermodularity of the model to solve this otherwise NP-hard problem. I find the effects of manufacturing reshoring policies are nonlinear, contingent upon firm heterogeneity, and they accumulate dynamically.