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 determine the continuity of labour-based location advantage. Opening access, local cohort succession and recruitment provide different dated services over committed production capital. Home-linked routes, shared foreign arrangements and admission institutions change host rankings.

Public article and replication, version 3.23.0, 28 October 2026. This version integrates a new analysis of held WRDS manufacturing records. Independently tabulated BEA production-equipment lives replace accounting-duration ratios; accounting-duration availability is removed as an eligibility condition. The expanded conditional allocation comparison uses 317 observations from 32 firms in nine hosts. An identical 299-observation comparison separates the duration specification. The engineering rotation contrast is -110.25 (95% interval -520.28 to 299.78; positive-direction p=0.724). Joint positive service pricing and rotation are unestablished (p=0.763); familywise contradiction is also unestablished (p=0.712). These are observational allocations; intended plant life and delivered recruitment are not observed.

The documented twenty-year JLR host appraisal supplies a EUR106-226 million strategic hurdle after disclosed delay and aid adjustments. Its recruitment component is unobserved. A five-percent continuous-discount reference annuity is EUR8.38-17.88 million per year; it does not use JLR's redacted internal rate. The text preserves all competing strategic factors and prevents double counting labour already included in financial cash flows.

The article contains 9,772 counted words, a 180-word abstract and 21 full substantive text pages before references; the manuscript has 41 pages and six figures. The appendix has 126 pages. All earlier estimates, formal results and figures are retained. Regression tables report three-decimal probabilities without significance stars and explicit economic magnitudes.

Start with README.txt. The current manuscript, appendix and complete LaTeX are directly downloadable. The three current verified ZIP blocks, restoration helper and nine frozen complementary base archives reconstruct the exact 1,858-file replication tree, verified by 1,857 checksum entries. The engineering_bridge module reconstructs inference and monetary thresholds from supplied aggregate estimates; full reestimation uses saved licensed inputs reproduced by the subscriber queries. No new data were acquired. Licensed issuer rows are excluded. Third-party source PDFs retain their rights; the journal articles and Lyons dissertation are linked rather than redistributed.

The exact declaration reads: ChatGPT and Codex (OpenAI) were used in October 2026 for coding help, literature search, and red teaming and review. Reviewer files exclude author identifiers. Public metadata supplies attribution. This public deposit is not a journal submission or acceptance.