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An Empirical Investigation on the Transfer of Expatriates Within MNCs from a Knowledge Perspective
Author(s) -
AstorneFigari Carmen,
Lee Joonhyung
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
oxford bulletin of economics and statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.131
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0084
pISSN - 0305-9049
DOI - 10.1111/obes.12254
Subject(s) - multinational corporation , unobservable , business , perspective (graphical) , corporation , knowledge transfer , industrial organization , empirical research , trace (psycholinguistics) , economic geography , economics , management , econometrics , finance , computer science , philosophy , epistemology , artificial intelligence , linguistics
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.