An Empirical Investigation on the Transfer of Expatriates Within MNCs from a Knowledge Perspective
研究了跨国公司如何通过外派人员将知识从总部转移到海外子公司，发现沟通成本越高，外派使用越多，但行业复杂性会削弱这种关系。
Abstract We study the use of expatriates in transferring knowledge within a multinational corporation (MNC). We argue that MNCs use expatriates to allocate knowledge between headquarters and its foreign affiliates. With data from MNCs headquartered in South Korea, we trace unobservable knowledge using observable labour mobility. Our empirical analysis shows that the use of expatriates increases as communication between South Korea and the host country becomes more costly. However, the extent to which the use of expatriates relates with communication costs decreases in the sectoral complexity.