Divestment of Foreign Manufacturing Affiliates: Country Platforms, Multinational Plant Networks, and Foreign Investor Agglomeration

We develop hypotheses concerning the impact of multinational firms' international plant networks and host country foreign investor agglomeration on the divestment of manufacturing affiliates, drawing on real option theory and location and agglomeration theory. We test our hypotheses on a comprehensive sample of 1078 Asian manufacturing affiliates of Japanese multinational firms in the electronics industry during the turbulent years preceding and...