Subsidiary Headquarters: The Urban Geography of the "Second Tier" of Corporate Decision-Making Activity in North America

Abstract

The complexity of the modern firm is one of the defining features of the global economy. This study examines one dimension in which this complexity can be observed, the corporate subsidiary. Here we investigate where the headquarters of the largest subsidiaries are located in the United States, where subsidiary growth is occurring, and how the United States compared with Canada from 1996 to 2004. The results show that U.S. parent and subsidiary headquarters have different metropolitan distributions, and that 1996-2004 parent and subsidiary growth patterns were also distinct. New York saw its parent headquarters community grow, while its subsidiary headquarters community exhibited the sharpest decline of any U.S. metropolitan area. This spatial behavior was the opposite of what occurred in Canada, where Toronto dominated in subsidiary growth while experiencing one of the largest parent headquarters declines among Canadian metropolitan areas. Our study interprets these results and calls for further research to pursue the questions raised here.

Keywords:

• subsidiaries
• headquarters/head offices
• quaternary location theory