CEPII, Recherche et Expertise sur l'economie mondiale
The Few Leading the Many: Foreign Affiliates and Business Cycle Comovement


Jörn Kleinert
Julien Martin
Farid Toubal

 Points clés :

 Résumé :
This paper uses micro-data on balance sheets, trade, and the nationality of ownership of firms in France to investigate the effect of foreign multinationals on business cycle comovement. We first show that foreign affiliates, which represent a tiny fraction of all firms, are responsible for a high share of employment, value added, and trade both at the national and at the regional levels. We also show that the distribution of foreign affiliates across regions differs with the nationality of the parent. We then show that foreign affiliates increase the comovement of activities between their region of location and their country of ownership. We find that intra-firm trade in intermediate inputs is a significant channel of influence of business cycle comovement. These findings suggest that a non-negligible part of business cycle comovement is driven by a few multinational companies, and that the international transmission of shocks is partly due to linkages between affiliates and their foreign parents.

 Mots-clés : Granularité | Cycles d’Affaire | Commerce Intra-firme | Intra-firm Trade

 JEL : F23, F12, F4, F41
CEPII Working Paper
N°2012-18, August 2012

Résumés non-techniques

Texte intégral

Référence
BibTeX (with abstract),
plain text (with abstract),
RIS (with abstract)

Contact: 
Retour