Borrowed Youth: Demographic Change and Multinational Location Advantage

Why can two multinationals prefer different hosts for the same plant? A manufacturer needs access both to workers at opening and to the cohorts that will replace them. Home-country recruitment and a team shared with another foreign affiliate change the value of that succession. Jaguar Land Rover chose Nitra over Puebla on a twenty-year appraisal. Slovakia had the larger initial adult share, while Mexico had stronger cohort replacement. If every 2015 resident stays and survives, 76 people reach twenty per hundred reaching sixty-five in Slovakia, against 203 in Mexico. Treating aid as cash caps Nitra's funded lead at EUR91 million. Holding that yardstick fixed, losing 223 net placements per year after substitutes costs EUR91.05 million over twenty years and EUR65.54 million over the fourteen-year vehicle machinery life. It takes 310 placements per year to exceed EUR91 million over fourteen years. The calculation assumes immediate operation, exponential productive tenure averaging 4.57 years, EUR10,000 net per staffed year and five-percent continuous discounting. Actual site placements and the fourteen-year margin are unobserved. Online Appendix K reports two comparisons. The country regression uses identical outcomes, fixed effects and 1,637 observations. Revaluing the three demographic services over twenty years in 86 motor-vehicle cells across 15 hosts changes the full-sample arrival association from 6.5% to 6.1% (95% interval 1.2–11.2%, p=0.018). For the primary firm sample, the twenty-to-fourteen-year ratio of conditional asset multipliers for 10,000 additional network-weighted annual arrivals is 1.19 (95% interval 0.66–2.15, p=0.506). Neither panel supports Hypothesis 1 on relative duration weights. The case supplies a decision threshold and the panels measure allocations. No new observations have been added. The anonymous manuscript, online appendix, LaTeX, figure files, editable tables and replication are available here. README.txt gives restoration instructions. Run site_succession/compare_horizons.py for Table K1 and site_succession/refit_vehicle_horizon.py for Table K2. There are 2,029 replication files with 2,028 checksums. Licensed WRDS rows require subscriber access. Queries and aggregate estimates are supplied. The main PDF contains 9,969 words including exhibits. There are 20 full pages of substantive text before the 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.