What makes a city attractive for multinational enterprise headquarters?

MNE headquarter location choice has been a long-debated issue for decades. This paper aims at the factors that could influence and alter MNEs’ location decision from a city’s perspective, tries to find the relationship between the important factors and city attractiveness. Firstly, previous literature about MNEs locating factors was reviewed, and the focus of this study locates on corporate tax rate, labour cost and inward FDI of the region or city. Multiple regression analysis was done, centered on the three core variables and controlled for other relevant variables that might have an impact on city attractiveness. After diagnosis and correction, two models with one interaction term were tested with a constraint of sample size. In conclusion, inward FDI is positively linked to city attractiveness, and corporate tax and labour cost were proved to be insignificant to affect MNE headquarter locational decisions.