Borrowed Youth: Demographic Change and Multinational Location Advantage

Why can manufacturers with the same plant and the same foreign finalists choose different hosts? The article distinguishes an opening workforce from control over continuing international recruitment. A shared affiliate can change one group's choice. A commercial agency offering the same terms can attract several firms to the host.

Jaguar Land Rover selected Nitra over Puebla for a twenty-year plant. Four pre-choice migration reconstructions put the extra UK recruitment route's twenty-year contribution to Nitra's relative bid at EUR7.19–19.06 million under ten additional hires per hundred UK arrivals at both sites. With Nitra ahead by EUR6.10–7.32 million on other terms at both horizons, all four put the fourteen-year plant in Nitra with India alone and the twenty-year plant in Puebla unless UK access is added. Under equal prior odds and a common normal residual bid advantage centred on EUR7 million (standard deviation EUR30 million), the funded choice gives the two-origin offer 54.5–60.0% posterior probability. The probability that removing UK access moves the plant to Puebla is 9.0–20.0%, or 4.7–11.4% when delivery is uniformly distributed between zero and ten hires per hundred. Giving equal weight to the winning margins allowed by the EUR91 million award and the Commission's no-aid finding gives 3.9–10.5% probability of a different winner upon withdrawing UK access, with full delivery. Keeping the plant open for twenty years but closing UK hiring after year fourteen retains 87.7% of its value. Removing the final six hiring cohorts changes the winning country with 0.5–1.3% posterior probability under the award benchmark. The replication includes 108 dated valuations and 12 checks of the minimum hiring duration. The agreement and residual bid value are unobserved. Appendix K gives sensitivity to alternative priors and the Commission's no-aid decision. Code independently reproduces 600 model-conditional posterior comparisons from the previously archived evidence.

Separate country and multinational analyses quantify the probability of a positive shift in the relative investment response to arrivals. Under the reference priors these probabilities are 41% in the primary country panel and 71% in the primary firm panel. The probability of a relative gain of at least ten per cent is 58% in the primary firm comparison. On the same 299 allocations the probability of any gain is 69% under industry machinery lives and 11% under parent accounting lives. The article explains the change in direction. The four-price analysis gives less than 0.1% probability to both workforce sources attracting capital at both horizons and arrivals gaining relative weight under the stated joint prior.

Online Appendix K and the route_pivotality and bayesian_host_choice modules provide the sources, likelihoods, priors, alternative scales, numerical checks and the code for Figure 8. The anonymous manuscript, online appendix, LaTeX, editable tables and replication materials are available here. README.txt gives restoration instructions. Licensed WRDS observations require subscriber access. Public aggregate estimates and reconstruction code are included. The release has 2,090 replication files, 2,089 checksums, 9,937 words across all main PDF pages and 20 full substantive pages before references.

ChatGPT and Codex (OpenAI) were used in October 2026 for coding help, literature search, and red teaming and review. All figures were drawn with AI-assisted code from the model, demographic data and statistical estimates.