Stephen Hymer's research focused on the activities of multinational firms, which was the subject of his PhD dissertation The International Operations of National Firms: A Study of Direct Foreign Investment, presented in 1960, but published posthumously in 1976, by the Department of Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
13 Facts About Stephen Hymer
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Stephen Hymer enrolled at MIT in the fall of that year to study industrial relations, having moved to Boston where he met his wife, Gilda, from Montreal.
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Stephen Hymer taught economics at Yale University and had two sons.
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From 1970 until the time of this death, Hymer worked as an economics professor at the New School for Social Research in New York.
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Stephen Hymer combined his interests in Industrial Organization and International Trade in his doctoral thesis.
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Stephen Hymer died after a car accident in Shandaken, New York.
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Stephen Hymer is considered to be the father of International Business due to his contributions related to Foreign Direct Investment as well as his studies and academic production on the field of theories of multinational enterprises.
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Stephen Hymer established that there was a distinction between financial investments and these kinds of investments, which he named Foreign Direct Investment: the latter gives the firm control over the business activities in other countries whereas portfolio investment does not.
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The theory presented by Stephen Hymer is considered a departure from neo-classical perspective and the consideration of a perfect market structure.
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Stephen Hymer considered multinational firms to be better institutions than actual international markets in the process of stimulating business, and for information transmitting as well as price fixing.
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Stephen Hymer's language seemed impenetrable, and there were hardly any courses in the universities to help people understand him.
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Stephen Hymer argued that this hierarchal division of labor was a macrocosm of the internal division of labor reproduced within the multinational corporation.
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Stephen Hymer did not believe that these firms had become more powerful than nation-states; instead, multinationals were firmly rooted in the major financial centers of the world, and they tended to reinforce existing geographic and spatial boundaries and dependencies.