This inspired him to research the impact that multinational corporations have on local enterprises, as he feared the presence of new competitors might end up affecting his family's business.
He enrolled at MIT in the fall of that year to study industrial relations,[1] having moved to Boston where he met his wife, Gilda, also from Montreal.
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.
Hymer's main contributions, which predated most of today's existing theory on the subjects of multinational enterprises and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), are collected in eleven documents, including his 1960 doctoral thesis.
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.
This was all elaborated by Dunning and Pitelis in the academic paper: "Stephen Hymer's Contribution to International Business Scholarship: An assessment and extension".
This control allows either to suppress competition, or appropriate rents derived from advantages like skilled labour, cheap raw materials, access to capital markets or technology.
[6] In a series of articles published in the 1970s, he considered the relationship between nation-states and multinational firms, detailing their role in the creation of an international division of labor.