Much Ado About Nothing? Do Domestic Firms Really Benefit from Foreign Direct Investment? Governments the world over offer significant inducements to attract inward investment, motivated by the expectation of spillover benefits to augment the primary benefits of a boost to national income from new investment. This paper begins by reviewing possible sources of FDI induced spillovers. It then prov...

This paper examines the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on growth by focusing on the complementarities between FDI inflows and financial markets. In our earlier work, we find that FDI is beneficial for growth only if the host country has well-developed financial institutions. In this paper, we investigate whether this effect operates through factor accumulation and/or improvements in ...

This paper provides a set of empirical tests of the cross-sectional variation of stock volatility and investablility, where investability is defined as the degree to which a stock is accessible to foreigners. Unlike previous studies, which focus on market volatility and market return, we study the relationship between individual stock return volatility and its investablility. Our findings have ...

In this paper, we sought to extend the theory of the location determinants of MNEs by challenging one of the fundamental assumptions underlying it, namely that location advantages are absolutes whose values are identical for different MNEs. We explicitly acknowledge the relative value of location advantages for individual MNEs and search for the firm-specific attributes affecting this variation...

We develop a theory of a multinational corporation’s optimal mode of entry in a new market. The foreign firm can choose between a licensing agreement, a wholly owned subsidiary or shared control (joint venture). In an environment in which property rights are insecure, opportunism is possible, and the identification of new business opportunities is costly, we show that the relationship between t...

This paper examines the relationship between regional economic integration and FDI in North America, where two RIAs have been established over the past decade: a bilateral free trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. (CUSTA) and a trilateral agreement (NAFTA) incorporating Mexico as well. The North American experiences suggest substantially more modest impacts of regional trade agreements o...

The institutional structure of global commodity chains and cross-border production networks has a profound impact on how the benefits of globalized production are distributed. This paper engages with this issue by developing a model that combines the insights of earlier unequal exchange theorists and new work on global commodity chains to clarify the distributive dynamics of the expansion of lo...

This paper provides a different perspective on the firm-level empirical analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and capital demand adjustment in host countries. The author estimates a dynamic structural model of investment on a sample of 4672 Belgian firms observed between 2003 and 2010 that permits to distinguish the ‘ownership status’ of firms. He considers a dynamic discrete choic...

This paper investigates whether there is convergence in Total Factor Productivity at the establishment level, to the technological frontier. We find evidence of convergence to the frontier, which suggests the existence of technological spillovers. The speed of catch-up does not appear to vary with the extent of foreign presence in the industry. But foreign multinationals do make up a significan...

This paper studies the impact of trade liberalization in terms of tariff cuts within the Eastern European enlargement on German and Austrian firm productivity. Unique matching of data from 1994 to 2003 suggests that tariff reductions raise parent firm productivity significantly. A ten percentage point decrease in tariff rates can lead to total factor productivity gains of up to 2 percent. The d...