FDI from the south: The role of institutional distance and natural resources

Using a novel dataset of bilateral FDI flows, we analyze location choices of investors from emerging economies, with an emphasis on institutions and natural resources. We show that FDI from the South has a more regional aspect than investment from the North. Institutional distance has an asymmetric effect on FDI depending on whether investors choose countries with better or worse institutions. In the latter case, large institutional distance discourages FDI inflows, but this deterring effect is diminished for destination countries with substantial resources. We also find a complementary relationship between capital flows from the North and the South in developing recipient countries, which we attribute to different FDI patterns of these investors.     

Selected MENA countries' attractiveness to G7 investors

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the relative attractiveness of seven MENA countries (Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey) as a location for foreign portfolio investment (FPI) from the G7 investors' viewpoints over the period 2001-2005. We suggest a methodology based on the combination of the gravity model, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the goal programming model (GP). The gravity model is used to determine the attractiveness factors of a country with respect to FPI for 30 investing and 43 receiving countries. Results show the importance of information costs and bilateral trade in the determination of the bilateral asset holdings. The AHP method is applied to prioritize the set of FPI location alternatives according to variables' significance in the gravity model outcome; information costs, bilateral trade, GDP, investment freedom, institutional quality, and geographic distance. Results show that in general Saudi Arabia is the best destination for Japanese and US investors, Turkey is the favorite location for French, German, Italian and British investors and Algeria is the preferred country for Canadian investors. A combined AHP-GP model has been used to determine the degree of portfolio investment in each MENA country from the viewpoint of G7 investors. The relative attractiveness of MENA countries varies over time and across investors. In general, over the period 2001-2005, the most attractive country is Iran for Canadian, French and Italian investors, Turkey for German and British investors and Saudi Arabia for Japanese and US investors. For a MENA country to attract more FPI it should especially improve bilateral trade and institutional quality and reduce foreign investment restrictions and information costs.     

Foreign direct investment: the role of institutional and cultural determinants

Using panel data for 29 source and 65 host countries in the period 1995–2009, we examine the determinants of bilateral FDI stocks, focusing on institutional and cultural factors. The results reveal that institutional and cultural distance is important and that FDI has a predominantly regional aspect. FDI to developing countries is positively affected by better institutions in the host country, while foreign investors prefer to invest in developed countries that are more corrupt and politically unstable compared to home. The results indicate that foreign investors prefer to invest in countries with less diverse societies than their own.     

Foreign direct investment and bilateral investment treaties: An international political perspective

This paper investigates the effect of the implementation of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) on the bilateral stocks of foreign direct investment (FDI). We argue that the understanding of how BITs affect FDI requires recognizing that multinational enterprises (MNEs) are not Stateless and that their investment return may well depend on the quality of political relations between the home and host countries. Using bilateral FDI data and event data to measure political interactions between countries, we show that the effect of the entry into force of a BIT crucially depends on the quality of political relations between the signatory countries; it increases FDI more between countries with tense relationships than between friendly countries. We also find evidence that BITs and good domestic institutions are complementary. BITs should therefore be understood as a mechanism for host governments to credibly commit not to expropriate investors in the future.     

Financial development in adversarial and inquisitorial legal systems

This paper aims to understand why common law countries have more developed financial markets than civil law countries. One difference between these two legal origins is the procedure of evidence collection for a trial: It is adversarial in common law and inquisitorial in civil law. The adversarial system delegates the collection of evidence to a larger extent to lawyers than the inquisitorial system does. The paper presents a model of law and finance in which investors use courts to enforce their financial contracts with entrepreneurs. Investors are willing to lend more if courts collect evidence more efficiently. Financial markets are more developed in the adversarial than in the inquisitorial system if investors are richer than entrepreneurs or if lawyers are more productive than judges. Manipulation of evidence by lawyers has an ambiguous impact on finance.     

Birds of a feather: Evidence on commonality of corruption and democracy in the origin and location of foreign investment in Russian regions

We examine the effects of subnational variations in corruption and democratization on the location decisions of foreign investors in Russian regions using firm-level panel data for the period 1996–2007. We link these effects to the level of corruption and type of political regime in the country of origin of a foreign investor. We find a relationship between attributes of foreign investors' home countries and attributes of the regions in which investment takes place: foreign investors from less corrupt and democratic countries tend to invest in less corrupt and more democratic Russian regions, whereas those from more corrupt and non-democratic countries tend to invest in more corrupt and less democratic regions. An inference is that, in Russian regions with high corruption and with autocratic government, foreign direct investment appears driven by the personal interests of controlling regional political elites who collaborate for mutual gain with foreign investors from corrupt and autocratic countries. Our results suggest a general conclusion that origin and location of foreign investment are linked by common political culture.     

Toward private investment funds for development aid

Concessional aid from the developed world has been recognized as a constructive way of helping the least developed countries to escape the vicious circle of poverty and penury. A doubling or tripling of the present levels of contribution would be required. However, these requirements exceed donor countries' capacities under present institutional arrangements.This paper explores a way out of this dilemma. With the help of a scheme for recruiting investment funds directly from private investors, the choice of level and direction of development aid would be shifted from the public to the private sphere. Donor governments, instead of spending tax money directly on aid, could use this money to support interest rates on development aid bonds to be issued at a preferential rate to small investors. These bonds would be issued not by national governments, but by existing international banking institutions, such as the World Bank, etc.The scheme would operate as follows: 1) A large number of private investors would participate actively. This participation would be likely to increase investors' productivity and savings. 2) Investment bonds would be signed in favor of countries of one's choice, if so desired. 3) Recipient countries would not be bound to bilateral agreements. 4) The expertise of the banking institutions would ensure comparatively efficient loan disbursement. 5) The sum of individually committed development funds would exceed the amount that public choice is able to generate under majority rule.     

GLOBAL AND DIPLOMATIC POLITICAL RISKS AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT

This paper investigates whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) take into account both global and diplomatic political risks when investing abroad. Whereas global political risk is common to all foreign investors, diplomatic political risk is dyad-specific as it is related to the overall diplomatic climate between the home and host countries. The main result of this study is that both global and diplomatic political risks matter for U.S. MNEs investing in developing countries. Their required return on investment rises when the political risk faced by all foreign investors worsens or when diplomatic tensions arise between the United States and their host countries, presumably because in both cases uncertainty about future returns increases.     

Does a currency union affect trade? The time-series evidence

Does leaving a currency union reduce international trade? We answer this question using a large annual panel data set covering 217 countries from 1948 through 1997. During this sample a large number of countries left currency unions; they experienced economically and statistically significant declines in bilateral trade, after accounting for other factors. Assuming symmetry, we estimate that a pair of countries that starts to use a common currency experiences a near doubling in bilateral trade.     

International portfolio reallocation: Diversification benefits and European monetary union

We investigate the determinants of bilateral international equity and bond portfolio reallocation across a large cross-section of countries spanning over two sample periods: 1997-2001 and 1997-2005. We find that the strongest drivers are the marginal diversification benefits arising from the pure asset component and the initial degree of underweight. This evidence suggests that global portfolio reallocations over the asset boom and bust period were determined by optimal diversification considerations. We also find that due to economic and monetary union (EMU) the weight assigned by euro area investors to investment in euro area countries increased significantly in equity and fixed income portfolios, with a trade diverting effect against the British bond market.     

Pecking order and core‐periphery in international trade

This paper analyzes the impact of market size and trade costs on bilateral trade flows. A multi‐country trade model with firm‐level heterogeneity in productivities and countries’ market potential provides a simple micro foundation for the link between these variables. In the model, market size and trade costs jointly determine a country‐specific pecking order of exporters serving their destination countries. In a counterfactual setting where bilateral trade costs are homogeneous across country pairs, market size predicts a common ranking of exporters among destination countries. This leads to a unique core‐periphery structure of the world trade network. With heterogeneous trade costs, we illustrate the impact of market size and trade costs on bilateral trade flows and its margins in a simple gravity‐like setting. Using an instrumental variables approach, we find that both market size and trade costs (measured through the network position of countries) have a significant impact on bilateral exports: countries in the core bilaterally trade more with other countries in the core than with peripheral countries, conditional on typical observables.     

Corporate transparency, cream-skimming and FDI

We develop a simple information-based model of Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. On the one hand, the relative abundance of “intangible” capital in specialized industries in the source countries, which presumably generates expertise in screening investment projects in the host countries, enhances FDI flows. On the other hand, host-country relative corporate-transparency diminishes the value of this expertise, thereby reducing the flow of FDI. The model also demonstrates that the gains for the host country from FDI [over foreign portfolio investment (FPI)] are reflected in a more efficient size of the stock of domestic capital and its allocation across firms. These gains are shown to depend crucially (and positively) on the degree of competition among FDI investors. We provide also some evidence on the effects of corporate transparency indicators, such as accounting standards, on bilateral FDI flows from a panel of 24 OECD countries over the period of 1981-1998.     

Trade taxes and international investment

Abstract .  This paper demonstrates that international investment disturbs the conventionally understood equivalence between import tariffs and export taxes. Fundamentally, remittances to foreigners introduce an additional pecuniary channel between countries so that two-good Lerner Symmetry generally will not hold. Moreover, because tariffs subsidize investors in the local import competing sector while export taxes can extract rent from foreign investors in the export sector, the pattern of international investment will influence government preferences over trade policy  instruments  as well as levels. Notably, trade tax symmetry is restored by introducing a third policy tool in the form of a direct a tax on international remittances.     

Preplanned exit strategies in venture capital

This paper empirically considers the role of preplanned exits (the investor's initial strategy to sell the investee firm via an acquisition or an initial public offering (IPO) at the time of initial contract with the entrepreneur), legal conditions and investor versus investee bargaining power in the allocation of cash flow and control rights in entrepreneurial finance. We introduce a sample of 223 entrepreneurial investee firms financed by 35 venture capital funds in 11 continental European countries, and these data indicate the following. First, preplanned acquisition exits are associated with stronger investor veto and control rights, a greater probability that convertible securities will be used, and a lower probability that common equity will be used; the converse is observed for preplanned IPOs. Second, investors take fewer control and veto rights and use common equity in countries of German legal origin, relative to Socialist, Scandinavian, and French legal origin. Third, more experienced entrepreneurs are more likely to get financed with common equity and less likely to be financed with convertible preferred equity, while more experienced investors are more likely to use convertible preferred equity and less likely to use common equity.     

Information Markets and the Comovement of Asset Prices

Traditional asset pricing models predict that covariance between prices of different assets should be lower than what we observe in the data. This paper introduces markets for information that generate high price covariance within a rational expectations framework. When information is costly, rational investors only buy information about a subset of the assets. Because information production has high fixed costs, competitive producers charge more for low-demand information than for high-demand information. The low price of high-demand information makes investors want to purchase the same information that others are purchasing. When investors price assets using a common subset of information, news about one asset affects the other assets' prices; asset prices comove. The cross-sectional and time-series properties of comovement are consistent with this explanation.     

Attracting Fdi in a Politically Risky World*

Conventional wisdom holds that lack of government commitment deters foreign investment in developing countries. Yet this explanation is not convincing because some econometric studies have found little support for the role of political risk and host governments can offer upfront subsidies that compensate foreign investors for their sunk cost. This paper shows that a second commitment problem upsets the argument. A multinational firm cannot credibly commit to invest in only one country. Since countries differ in production costs and government credibility, this article explains the pattern of investment in a politically risky world.     

The pattern of international patenting and technology diffusion

The article focuses on the impact of R&D expenditure on labour productivity using international patent applications as a technology diffusion indicator. Considering the relationship between research and productivity, the pattern of international patenting reflects the channel between the source and the destination of transferred technology. Accounting for nonstationarity and cointegration, I find that patent-related foreign R&D spillovers are present for a panel of 18 OECD countries. Moreover, nonG7 OECD countries benefit more from foreign rather than domestic R&D activities. Estimates also show that there is no significant spillover effect from bilateral trade, but confirm the impact of FDI on domestic labour productivity.     

双边投资协定、制度环境和企业对外直接投资区位选择

双边投资协定是两国政府为了促进和保护双边投资签署的协议。作为特定的联系两国的双边制度因素,双边投资协定给企业提供了不同于国家制度环境的保护,因而对企业的投资区位决策产生影响。本文建立了关于双边投资协定、东道国制度环境与母国制度对发展中国家企业对外投资区位选择作用的研究框架。基于中国上市公司2003年至2009年对外直接投资的数据,本文有三点发现:首先,双边投资协定能够促进企业到签约国投资;其次,双边投资协定能够替补东道国制度的缺位,对于促进企业到制度环境较差的签约国投资的作用更大;此外,双边投资协定还能够弥补母国制度支持的不均衡性,对于帮助非国有企业到签约国投资有着显著的积极作用。     

Beyond trade creation: Preferential trade agreements and trade disputes

This study investigates the effects of preferential trade agreements (PTA) on bilateral trade disputes. We construct a unique and comprehensive dataset on inter-country trade disputes from 1995 to 2007. The dataset covers 110 countries and 1,162 bilateral country-pair trade disputes. Using this dataset in a gravity-type model of trade dispute analysis, we find that countries belonging to the same PTA tend to experience fewer trade conflicts among themselves than with non-member countries. By studying various types of PTA with different dispute settlement mechanisms, we further find that the dispute-reducing effect only comes from PTA with specific provisions on dispute settlement mechanisms. Moreover, the effect is stronger if those PTA explicitly stipulate that members can also resolve their disputes via the WTO Dispute Settlement Body. However, having PTA that do not address how members should resolve their disputes may lead to more dispute initiations than in cases without PTA.     

Home country effects of foreign direct investment: From a small economy to a large economy

Previous studies on home country effects mainly focused on FDI from large developed economies to other countries. But today's super recipient is a relatively larger economy than its investors and many of these investors are not classified as “developed economies.” A simple Ak type model implies that a small and more developed country investing in a large and less developed country will experience decreases in both employment and income disparity (compared to the recipient country) as the less-developed recipient country gains the higher technology of production through FDI inflows. The empirical results for the Four Tigers (source countries) and China (recipient country) are consistent with our theoretical model of FDI outflows. We also find that FDI outflows to China decrease the ratio of exports to GDP only for small source countries, even though a higher investment in China raises the share of these countries' exports-to-China to China's total imports.