Multi-unit firms have productivity advantages over competitors because of their use of a non-rival asset—firm-specific knowledge—in several units. Using knowledge-intensive services leads to economies of scope in production by multi-unit firms. Such headquarter are usually supplied by parent companies and serve to link different firm units. Headquarter services are difficult to quantify in statistics or surveys, except when they cross-borders and the exchange of services between MNEs and their offshore subsidiaries becomes apparent. This study therefore focuses on IT service imports to explain productivity differences among foreign affiliates of multinational firms in Germany. The authors base the analysis on the population of foreign multinational firms active in Germany and analyze what effect the import of IT services has on their productivity. They find that IT headquarter service flows have significant impacts on foreign affiliates’ productivity in general and US affiliates in particular. As the average IT-service flows (per firm and partner) from parent countries are significantly higher for US affiliates than non-US affiliates, they conclude that the import of IT services from the parent-company is a source of the productivity advantages of US affiliates in Germany.

多部门公司比竞争对手具有生产力优势，因为它们在多个部门中使用非竞争性资产（企业专有知识）。使用知识密集型服务可导致多部门公司的生产范围经济。该总部通常由母公司提供，并用于链接不同的公司部门。总部服务很难在统计或调查中量化，除非它们跨界并且跨国企业与其离岸子公司之间的服务交换变得显而易见。因此，本研究着重于IT服务的进口，以解释跨国公司在德国的外国子公司之间的生产率差异。作者基于活跃于德国的外国跨国公司的数量进行了分析，并分析了IT服务的进口对其生产率产生的影响。他们发现，IT总部的服务流程对外国分支机构的生产力，特别是美国分支机构的生产力产生重大影响。由于美国子公司从母公司获得的平均IT服务流量（按公司和合作伙伴计算）要比非美国子公司高得多，因此他们得出结论，从母公司进口IT服务是美国提高生产力的源泉。在德国的分支机构。