International Technology Sourcing Strategies and Inventor Employment

This study investigates the extent to which domestic and foreign R&D workers (i.e. “inventors”) employed by multinationals (MNEs) are complements or substitutes to each other. We argue that this relationship will be contingent on the strategy underlying MNEs’ foreign R&D activities, where we identify three such strategies: technological catch-up, technological diversification, and creating a R&D springboard. In the case of catch-up, we don’t...