Foreign Ownership and Global City Characteristics: Unpacking the Connectivity of Micro-locations

This paper develops the idea that global city characteristics in distinct micro-locations attract foreign and domestic firms differentially. The hypotheses are tested on a large data set of workplaces during the period 2007–16 and a complex relationship is found between global connectivity and foreign-owned location choice. Specifically, global infrastructure is strongly associated with foreign ownership in the upstream value chain (manufacturing or wholesale), whereas cosmopolitanism exhibits a stronger association with foreign ownership in downstream value-chain activities, such as retail. The agglomeration of producer services in a given location and the likelihood of foreign ownership in that location is higher in highly knowledge-intensive industries.