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

Borrowed Youth and the Geography of Production Investment explains how national cohort succession and international recruitment become firm-specific location advantages over a production commitment. Home-linked relationships, recruitment shared across foreign affiliates and admission institutions determine which replacement workers remain attainable. Version 3.28.0 connects the organisational propositions to a documented foreign-host appraisal. The held Commission decision reports a EUR106-226 million strategic hurdle and 2,834 planned direct jobs. At an assumed five-percent reference rate, the hurdle is EUR2,959-6,308 per planned job-year. An inverse-appraisal frontier states the additional productive services and delivery costs needed for a proposed renewal explanation to cover an assigned share; all prior priced labour effects are excluded. Reference-rate and service-fraction sensitivity are reproduced in Appendix L. No recruitment share or route cost is fitted to the selected host. A general cost-saving bound separates fixed-life value improvements from the stronger assumptions required for a unique switch across lives. Existing joint allocation tests are unchanged: Holm-adjusted probabilities remain 0.113, 0.085 and 0.656; they do not establish the directional mechanism. The multinational results lead the formal analysis, followed by the renewal accounting and host-ranking conditions. Quantitative sections separate demographic exposure, conditional capital allocations and financial appraisal thresholds. Main Propositions 1-4 correspond to Appendix A Propositions 4, 5, 1 and 8; the appendix records the mapping. All formal results, equations, estimates, uncertainty and six figures are retained. The worked host comparison precedes the equations. Main Proposition 1 defines its gap and common productive-tenure condition explicitly. Figure 1 uses white backgrounds and direct labels with unchanged calculations. The held engineering-life analysis covers 317 foreign-country allocations from 32 manufacturers in nine hosts. Its contrast is -110.25 (95 percent interval -520.28 to 299.78; positive-direction p=0.724). Joint positive service pricing and rotation are unestablished (p=0.763); the familywise contradiction test does not reject (p=0.712). These are conditional allocations, not identified host choices. A documented twenty-year JLR appraisal gives a EUR106-226 million strategic hurdle, with recruitment's share unobserved. Public recruitment charges provide separate conditional bounds. No new observations were acquired or regressions re-estimated. The manuscript has 9,954 counted words, a 192-word abstract and 21 full substantive pages before references; the main PDF has 41 pages and the appendix 130. Three-decimal table probabilities, no significance stars and economic magnitudes are retained. Counts include abstract, main text, references and transparency; separately placed exhibits and the online appendix are excluded. Start with README.txt. Current article, appendix and complete LaTeX are directly downloadable. The three current verified ZIP blocks and nine frozen complementary archives reconstruct the exact 1,874-file replication tree with 1,873 checksum entries. Licensed WRDS rows are excluded; subscriber queries and public aggregate reconstruction are supplied. Third-party rights remain. Article PDFs used as literature sources are linked rather than redistributed. ChatGPT and Codex (OpenAI) were used in October 2026 for coding help, literature search, and red teaming and review. Reviewer files omit author identifiers; public metadata identifies the author. This deposit is not a journal submission or acceptance.