Staying home or moving away? Employment creation and destruction within multinationals

Abstract

This paper analyzes employment growth in Belgian multinational enterprises’ headquarters relative to their affiliates. We find that headquarters have on average 2.5% more employment growth than their affiliates. When they go through restructuring headquarters reduce employment by 4.4% less than their affiliates and affiliates located further away from their headquarterssuffer more. This effect almost doubles for firms that operate in manufacturing.