Essays on multinational R&D, intellectual property rights, and knowledge spillover

Institutional idiosyncrasies influence the formulation and outcome of firm strategies. At the same time, firms are playing an increasingly important role in facilitating institutional changes. Understanding this interaction is crucial for managers as well as policy makers in the global economy.; My dissertation specifically examines multinational R&D strategies and the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR). In Chapter One, I study how US MNEs use their internal organizations to protect knowledge, so as to take advantage of the inexpensive human capital in countries with weak IPR protection. The impact of such cross-border arbitrage on policy choices is analyzed in Chapter Two. Essentially, a slack IPR policy, which was meant to help the domestic firms, may even shift resources to MNEs who possess alternative mechanisms to protect their knowledge. Essay Three uses a general equilibrium framework to examine firms' endogenous R&D investment decisions in face of globalization, and the consequence to knowledge spillover.; There are two boundaries involved in multinational activities: the firm boundary and the national boundary. MNEs are of particular interest because they expand their firm boundaries across multiple national environments; as a result, national policies are no longer independent of one another. The goal of my dissertation is to contribute to our understanding of firm strategy, institutional changes, and economic growth.