JEL: F15, F23, F12

This paper studies the role of business and social networks in international investment by examining the effects of ethnic Chinese networks on foreign direct investment (FDI) in China. After controlling for a variety of economic determinants of FDI, this study finds a significant positive role in inward FDI of ethnic Chinese networks proxied by the population share of ethnic Chinese in the inve...

We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being more embedded in international markets through exporting or being part of a multinational. Our results...

This paper argues that multinational companies can impact positively on the survival of plants in the host country through technology spillovers. We study this effect empirically by estimating a Cox proportional hazard model on plant level data for Irish manufacturing. Our results show that, ceteris paribus, the presence of multinationals has a life enhancing effect on indigenous plants in high...

Gravity modelling has been used extensively in analysing trade flows but less so for crossborder investment. Recent theoretical work provides an underpinning for applications to FDI. In this paper we estimate a gravity model to evaluate the potential for increased FDI for a sample of Eastern European countries, following accession to the EU. Preliminary results suggest limited potential in manu...

We investigate the impact of international outsourcing on productivity using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. Specifically, we distinguish the effect of outsourcing of materials from services inputs. Moreover, we examine whether the impact on productivity is different for plants being more embedded in international markets through exporting or being part of a multinational. Our results...

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. We find that the distributions for multinationals dominate that of domestic exporters and non-exporters, while we do not find clear differences in plant performan...

Studies have found the impact of foreign direct investments (FDI) on productivity growth to be firm-industry-host economy specific. However, the impact of FDI may differ with the existing market conditions in the economy and also with respect to the source of the FDI. The paper examines the impact of FDI on productivity growth of the Indian industry in the period of low market demand conditions...

Do intellectual property rights influence multinationals’ manufacturing location decisions? My theoretical model indicates that countries with strong patent laws attract multinational activity, but only in sectors with relatively long product life cycles. By contrast, firms with short life-cycle technologies are insensitive, because offshore imitation is less likely to succeed before obsolescen...

A panel of ex-ante forecasts of a single time series is modeled as a dynamic factor model, where the conditional expectation is the single unobserved factor. When applied to out-of-sample forecasting, this leads to combination forecasts that are based on methods other than OLS. These methods perform well in a Monte Carlo experiment. These methods are evaluated empirically in a panel of simulate...