Brakman, S., Garretsen, H., van Marrewijk, C. and van Witteloostuijn, A. (2023). The location of cross-border and national mergers and acquisitions within the United States Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 32(1):177--206.

Research on the location choice of foreign direct investment (FDI) focuses on the choice between countries. The within-country location choice is either not analyzed at all or restricted to greenfield investments only. The majority of FDI, however, takes the form of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M\&As). We develop and test a pair of hypotheses regarding location-target selection for both cross-border and national M\&As across the United States, expecting differences in line with the liability of foreignness argument. Using a detailed firm-level data set for M\&As in the period 1985–2012, we compare location choices of cross-border versus national M\&As. We find that cross-border M\&As are more spatially concentrated, and tend to sort into larger agglomerations than national M\&As. This finding holds both for urban agglomerations in isolation, as well as for agglomerations that take the economic geography of the United States into account.