Borrowed Youth and the Geography of Production Investment: Article and Replication Materials

Borrowed Youth and the Geography of Production Investment explains how country demographic trajectories and multinational organisation jointly determine the continuity of labour-based location advantage. Opening access, local cohort succession and international recruitment supply distinct services over a production commitment. Under common tenure and the stated site conditions, the preferred host switches at most once as planned operating life increases. Home-linked recruitment, shared foreign arrangements and admission institutions change the country comparison.

Public article and replication, version 3.21.0, 28 October 2026. The article develops its argument within JIBS debates on location advantages, human-capital mobility, cross-border coordination and investment commitment. It distinguishes host rankings across project horizons from later relocation decisions. The original formal results, empirical estimates, uncertainty, six figures and editable tables are retained. No new mechanism estimate is claimed.

The manuscript contains 9,953 counted words, a 196-word abstract, 22 full substantive text pages before references, 40 total pages, six figures and three tables. The online appendix has 122 pages. Regression tables retain three-decimal p-values, p<0.001 for smaller probabilities, no significance stars and explicit economic magnitudes.

Start with README.txt. The current manuscript, appendix and complete LaTeX are directly downloadable. Three verified current ZIP blocks and their restoration helper combine with the nine complementary frozen base archives to reconstruct the exact 1,839-file replication tree and verify 1,838 checksum entries. The publication_reporting module reconstructs the current source and bibliography from frozen editorial inputs after reproducing the statistical tables.

The held country and multinational panels establish neither joint support nor a familywise contradiction for positive service pricing and rotation. The reference-fee envelope supplies conditional exclusions and non-exclusions. Licensed WRDS observations are excluded; subscriber queries and aggregate outputs are supplied. Third-party Lyons dissertation and journal-article PDFs are not republished; factual coding, original repository links, bibliographic sources and reconstruction instructions are supplied.

The exact AI declaration is: ChatGPT and Codex (OpenAI) were used in October 2026 for coding help, literature search, and red teaming and review. Reviewer payloads exclude author identifiers; public repository metadata provides attribution. Original work is CC BY 4.0; third-party rights remain. This public deposit is not a journal submission or acceptance.