Multinationals As Stabilizers?: Economic Crisis And Plant Employment Growth

This paper examines the link between multinational enterprises and employment growth at the plant-level. The authors investigate in detail the comparative response of multinationals and domestic firms to an economic crisis, using the empirical setting of a well defined case of economic slowdown in Chile as a natural experiment. In the empirical analysis they find that employment growth in manufacturing plants has been drastically reduced during the economic crisis. More importantly, they do not find evidence that multinationals react to the economic crisis differently than do domestic firms.