Building on recent international business research that embraces insights from economic geography, we hypothesise that MNEs locating a high share of the total number of their subsidiaries in global cities (which we conceptualize as global city location intensity) exhibit higher financial performance. We further argue that knowledge-intensive firms benefit more from global city location intensity than less knowledge-intensive firms. We also posit that multinationality (international geographic dispersion) negatively moderates the relationship between global city location intensity and financial performance. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 497 MNEs and find strong support for our predictions. We contribute to the literature by introducing the notion of intensity into the relationship between global city locations and financial performance and call for considering scale effects when examining locational decisions and their consequences.

基于最近包含经济地理学见解的国际商业研究，我们假设在全球城市（我们将其概念化为全球城市位置强度）的子公司总数中所占比例较高的跨国企业表现出更高的财务绩效。我们进一步认为，知识密集型企业比知识密集型程度较低的企业从全球城市区位强度中获益更多。我们还认为，跨国性（国际地理分散）对全球城市区位强度与财务绩效之间的关系产生负面影响。我们在 497 家跨国公司的样本中测试了我们的假设，并发现我们的预测得到了强有力的支持。我们通过将强度概念引入全球城市位置与财务绩效之间的关系来为文献做出贡献，并呼吁在研究位置决策及其后果时考虑规模效应。