Abstract

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether and how the multinational status and foreign ownership affect the survival of Italian manufacturing firms. To this end, we carry out the analysis on firm survival distinguishing the Italian firms in foreign multinationals, domestic multinationals and domestic non-multinational firms. In the empirical analysis, carried out over the period 2004-2008 and based on the Cox proportional hazard model, we look for the impact of ownership dummies on firm survival controlling for several firm and industry specific covariates. Our findings reveal that manufacturing firms owned by foreign multinationals are more likely to exit from the market than both domestic multinationals and domestic non-multinational firms. However, when we split our sample according the degree of technological intensity, we found that the footloose nature of foreign multinationals is inherently stronger into the less dynamic industries.