Global Production with Export Platforms*
构建了一个可量化的多国一般均衡模型，纳入跨国公司的出口平台销售和外国投资的固定成本，利用德国企业数据估计模型，并校准至十二个欧美国家数据，发现跨国公司在技术传播中起重要作用，且加欧贸易投资协定可能使欧盟跨国公司的生产从美国大量转移至加拿大。
Abstract Most international commerce is carried out by multinational firms, which use their foreign affiliates both to serve the market of the host country and to export to other markets outside the host country. In this article, I examine the determinants of multinational firms’ location and production decisions and the welfare implications of multinational production. The few existing quantitative general equilibrium models that incorporate multinational firms achieve tractability by assuming away export platforms—that is, they do not allow foreign affiliates of multinationals to export—or by ignoring fixed costs associated with foreign investment. I develop a quantifiable multicountry general equilibrium model, which tractably handles multinational firms that engage in export platform sales and that face fixed costs of foreign investment. I first estimate the model using German firm-level data to uncover the size and nature of costs of multinational enterprise and show that the fixed costs of foreign investment are large. Second, I calibrate the model to data on trade and multinational production for twelve European and North American countries. Counterfactual analysis reveals that multinationals play an important role in transmitting technological improvements to foreign countries and that the pending Canada-EU trade and investment agreement could divert a sizable fraction of the production of EU multinationals from the U.S. to Canada.