C. Fritz Foley

Foreign Direct Investment and the Domestic Capital Stock

This paper evaluates evidence of the impact of outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic investment rates. OECD countries with high rates of outbound FDI in the 1980s and 1990s exhibited lower domestic investment than other countries, which suggests that FDI and domestic investment are substitutes. U.S. time series data tell a very different story, however: years in which American multinational firms have greater foreign capital expenditures coincide with greater domestic capital spending by the same firms. One dollar of additional foreign capital spending is associated with 3.5 dollars of additional domestic capital spending in the time series, implying that foreign and domestic capital are complements in production by multinational firms. This effect is consistent with cross sectional evidence that firms whose foreign operations expand simultaneously expand their domestic operations, and suggests that interpretation of the OECD cross sectional evidence may be confounded by omitted variables.

Chains of Ownership, Regional Tax Competition, and Foreign Direct Investment

This paper considers the effect of taxation on the location of foreign direct investment (FDI) and taxable income reported by multinational firms with particular attention to the regional dynamics of tax competition and the role of chains of ownership. Confidential affiliate-level data are used to compare the investment and income-reporting behavior of American-owned foreign affiliates across ownership forms and regions. Ten percent higher tax rates are associated with 5.0 percent lower FDI, controlling for parent company and observable aspects of local economies, and 0.9 percent lower returns on assets, controlling for parent company and level of FDI. Tax effects are particularly strong within Europe, where ten percent higher tax rates are associated with 7.7 percent lower FDI and 1.7 percent lower returns on assets. Indirectly owned foreign affiliates also exhibit strong tax effects, ten percent higher tax rates being associated with 12.0 percent lower FDI and 1.4 percent lower returns on assets. American firms finance a growing fraction of their foreign operations indirectly through chains of ownership, which now account for more than 30 percent of aggregate foreign assets and sales. Ownership chains are particularly concentrated among European affiliates. Since multinational firms from countries other than the United States face tax environments similar to those faced by indirectly owned affiliates of American companies, these results suggest a greater sensitivity of FDI to taxes for non-American firms. The results also suggest that European economic integration may have the effect of intensifying tax competition between European jurisdictions.

Impediments to Promoting Backward Linkages from the Garment Industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract The slow growth of backward linkages from the garment industries (export-oriented) in developing countries and the policy merits of promoting these linkages have considerable contemporary relevance. Backward linkages are useful particularly for a garment industry to reduce the lead time and remain competitive in the international market. Local suppliers to the garment industry cannot function however unless conditions exist which allow them to be competitive. Furthermore, in a world where multinational garment-buying firms are dominant, a large import dependence in the garment industry does not necessarily imply that there are many opportunities to create local supplies and thereby create backward linkages. These factors are shown from the Sri Lankan attempts to promote backward linkages from the garment industry. It is argued that formation of backward linkages in the garment industry that operate in an open economy such as Sri Lanka is a natural outcome of industrial deepening and therefore will be time dependent. It is noted that even with less backward linkages, the garment industry in Sri Lanka has contributed significantly to foreign exchange earnings and employment creation in the country.

Ethnic Innovation and U.S. Multinational Firm Activity

This paper studies the impact that ethnic innovators have on the global activities of U.S. firms by analyzing detailed data on patent applications and on the operations of the foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational .rms. The results indicate that increases in the share of a firm’s innovation performed by inventors of a particular ethnicity are associated with increases in the share of that firm’s affiliate activity in countries related to that ethnicity. Ethnic innovators also appear to facilitate the disintegration of innovative activity across borders and to allow U.S. multinationals to form new affiliates abroad without the support of local joint venture partners.

Facts and Fallacies about U.S. FDI in China

Despite the rapid expansion of U.S.-China trade ties, the increase in U.S. FDI in China, and the expanding amount of economic research exploring these developments, a number of misconceptions distort the popular understanding of U.S. multinationals in China. In this paper, we seek to correct four common misunderstandings by providing a statistical portrait of several aspects of U.S. affiliate activity in the country and placing this activity in its appropriate economic context.

The Comovement of Returns and Investment within the Multinational Firm

Can financial integration, particularly the cross-border investments of multinational firms, help explain the synchronization of business cycles? This paper presents evidence on the comovement of returns and investment within U.S. multinational firms to address this question. These firms constitute significant fractions of economic output and investment in most large economies, suggesting that they could create significant economic linkages. Aggregate measures of rates of return and investment rates of U.S. multinational firms located in different countries are highly correlated across countries. Firm-level regressions demonstrate that rates of return and investment rates of affiliates are highly correlated with the rates of return and investment of the affiliates parent and other affiliates within the same parent system, controlling for country and industry factors. The evidence on these interrelationships and the importance of multinationals to local economies suggests that global firms may be an important channel for transmitting economic shocks. This evidence also sheds light on asset pricing puzzles related to the diversification benefits provided by multinational firms.

Agency Costs, Mispricing, and Ownership Structure

Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear agency costs and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We show that if equity is overvalued, however, mispricing offsets agency costs and can induce a controlling shareholder to list equity. Higher valuations support listings associated with greater agency costs. We test the predictions that follow from this idea on a sample of publicly listed corporate subsidiaries in Japan. When there is greater scope for expropriation by the parent firm, minority shareholders fare poorly after listing. Parent firms often repurchase subsidiaries at large discounts to valuations at the time of listing and experience positive abnormal returns when repurchases are announced.