Longitudinal Data
Another general problem with research on international business lies in the cost of constructing data bases. A data base is of course the classic public good with a marginal resource cost to subsequent users much below that of the original assembler. Some branches of both business and economic research enjoy access to rich common-use data bases: finance, of course; labor economics; and recently, research on taxation of international business. Lacking, however, are longitudinal data bases to track the sequences of foreign direct investments undertaken by MNEs. One recalls fondly Raymond Vernon's Harvard Multinational Enterprises Project (HMEP), which sustained such a data set tracking large บ.ร. MNEs from their earliest days up to 1975 (Curhan et al., 1977). This source nourished much of our foundation stock of knowledge about MNEs.