Modeling Foreign Direct Investment as a Longitudinal Social Network∗

An extensive literature in international and comparative political economy has focused on the how the mobility of capital affects the ability of governments to tax and regulate firms. The conventional wisdom holds that governments are in competition with each other to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). Nation-states observe the fiscal and regulatory decisions of competitor governments, and are forced to either respond with policy changes or risk losing foreign direct investment, along with the politically salient jobs that come with these investments. The political economy of FDI suggests a network of investments with complicated dependencies. We propose an empirical strategy for modeling investment patterns in 24 advanced industrialized countries from 19852000. Using bilateral FDI data we estimate how increases in flows of FDI affect the flows of FDI in other countries. Our statistical model is based on the methodology developed by Westveld & Hoff (2007). The model allows the temporal examination of each notion’s activity level in investing, attractiveness to investors, and reciprocity between pairs of nations. We extend the model by treating the reported inflow and outflow data as independent replicates of the true value and allowing for a mixture model for the fixed effects portion of the network model. Using a fully Bayesian approach, we also impute missing data within the MCMC algorithm used to fit the model.