TY - JOUR
T1 - Multi-plant operation and headquarters separation
T2 - Evidence from Japanese plant-level panel data
AU - Okubo, Toshihiro
AU - Tomiura, Eiichi
N1 - Funding Information:
Comments from the two anonymous referees result in a substantial improvement of this paper. The authors also acknowledge the comments made by the seminar participants at RIETI and Hitotsubashi University. This study is conducted as a part of the Project “Historical Evaluation of Industrial Policies” undertaken at RIETI. This research is partly funded by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research and RIETI. The access to official micro-data was arranged by RIETI.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2016/9/1
Y1 - 2016/9/1
N2 - This paper shows (i) under what circumstances corporate headquarters (HQs) are separated from production plants and (ii) what type of plants are operated by multi-plant firms. By analyzing Japanese plant-level panel data from manufacturing census, we find that large-sized plants or plants intensively purchasing materials significantly tend to be separated from HQs and become a part of multi-plant operations. This pattern suggests an impact of managerial burden. We confirm the robustness of our main findings by dynamic switching patterns of plant status. Factors of economic geography, such as distance from core, also have noticeable impacts.
AB - This paper shows (i) under what circumstances corporate headquarters (HQs) are separated from production plants and (ii) what type of plants are operated by multi-plant firms. By analyzing Japanese plant-level panel data from manufacturing census, we find that large-sized plants or plants intensively purchasing materials significantly tend to be separated from HQs and become a part of multi-plant operations. This pattern suggests an impact of managerial burden. We confirm the robustness of our main findings by dynamic switching patterns of plant status. Factors of economic geography, such as distance from core, also have noticeable impacts.
KW - Corporate headquarters
KW - Multi-plant operation
KW - Plant size
KW - Plant-level data
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U2 - 10.1016/j.japwor.2016.06.002
DO - 10.1016/j.japwor.2016.06.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84978173307
SN - 0922-1425
VL - 39
SP - 12
EP - 22
JO - Japan and the World Economy
JF - Japan and the World Economy
ER -