Rodolphe Desbordes

THE POLITICAL INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN FIRMS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Foreign firms are likely to attempt to shape host government policies in their favour, as the profitability of MNE foreign affiliates largely depends on the business environment in which they operate. Based on data from the World Business Environment Survey, this paper investigates the political influence of foreign firms in 48 developing countries. It is found that foreign firms derive substantial fiscal and regulatory advantages from their political influence and from their ability to negotiate superior entry conditions.

Short-run strategies for attracting Foreign Direct Investment

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness and feasibility of two FDI policies, fiscal incentives and deregulation, aimed at improving the attractiveness of a country in the short run. Using disaggregated data on sales by US MNEs’ foreign affiliates in 43 developed and developing countries over the 1982–94 period, results show that the provision of fiscal incentives or the deregulation of the labour market would exert a positive impact on total FDI. Given the drawbacks frequently associated with the use of incentive packages, economy-wide policies which ease firing procedures and reduce severance payments would certainly be the best policy option. This paper also highlights the different aggregation and omitted variable biases that have affected results of previous studies and provides some support to recent theoretical models of FDI by showing that third-country effects and spatial interdependence influence respectively the location of export-platform FDI and vertical FDI.

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.

Market familiarity and the location of South and North MNEs

We use a systematic empirical analysis of the determinants of South-South (SS) and North-South (NS) foreign direct investment (FDI) as a canvas to explore how multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) location decisions are shaped by better acquaintance with a foreign market resulting from bilateral ties, experience of international expansion, and knowledge of how to deal with poor governance. We find that these various aspects of market familiarity, which can interact together, are important to explain and differentiate the location behaviors of South MNEs (S-MNEs) and North MNEs (N-MNEs) in developing countries.

Greenfield FDI and skill upgrading: A polarized issue

Outbound FDI is often accused of increasing income inequality in developed countries by shifting labour demand from low-skilled towards high-skilled workers (wage polarization). In response, we employ data on greenfield FDI that, in contrast to M&As, may be more clearly linked to skill upgrading. Our data also delineate greenfield FDI by sector, function and destination, allowing us to control for different motives and skill intensities for 17 developed countries for 20032005. We find that greenfield FDI in support services, e.g., back and front office services, induces polarized skill upgrading, benefitting high-skilled workers at the expense of medium-skilled workers, thereby polarizing wages.

Greenfield versus Merger & Acquisition FDI: Same Wine, Different Bottles?

Relying on a large foreign direct investment (FDI) transaction level dataset, unique both in terms of disaggregation and time and country coverage, this paper examines patterns in greenfield (GF) versus merger & acquisition (MA) investment. Although both are found to seek out large markets with low international barriers, important differences emerge. MA is more affected by geographic and cultural barriers and exhibits opportunistic behaviours as it is more sensitive to short-run changes, such as a currency crisis. On the other hand, GF is relatively driven by long-run factors, such as origincountry technological and institutional development or comparative advantage. These empirical facts are consistent with the conceptual distinction made between these two modes, i.e. MA involves transfer of ownership for integration or arbitrage reasons while GF relies on firms own capacities, which are linked to the origin countries attributes. They also suggest that GF and MA are likely to respond differently to policies intended to attract FDI.

Foreign direct investment and external financing conditions : evidence from normal and crisis times

This paper investigates the effects that external financing conditions in source and destination countries have on foreign direct investment (FDI) in normal and crisis times, using a difference-in- differences approach. We find that source and destination countries’ financial development have a strong positive impact on the relative volume of FDI in financially vulnerable sectors in normal times. On the other hand, during the 2008-2010 global financial crisis, the relative volume of FDI in financially vulnerable sectors fell relatively more in financially developed source and destination countries, most notably if these countries experienced a credit crisis.

Foreign Direct Investment and Democracy: A Robust Fixed Effects Approach to a Complex Relationship

We develop a new robust-to-outliers dummy estimator that we subsequently apply to investigate the impact of various democratic attributes on foreign direct investment in recent years. We find that democracy has generally a positive impact on foreign direct investment, once outliers are controlled for, but that this relationship is very specific to each host countrys characteristics.

The Pitfalls of Ignoring Outliers in Instrumental Variables Estimations: An Application to the Deep Determinants of Development

The extreme sensitivity of instrumental variables (IV) estimators to outliers is a crucial problem too often neglected or poorly dealt with. We address this issue by making the practitioner aware of the existence, usefulness, and inferential implications of robust-to-outliers instrumental variables estimators. We describe how the standard IV estimator can be made robust to outliers, provide a brief description of alternative robust IV estimators, simulate the behaviour of both the standard IV estimator and each robust IV estimator in presence of different types of outliers, and conclude by replicating a celebrated study on the deep determinants of development in order to establish the danger of ignoring outliers in an IV model.

External financial dependence and FDI responsiveness to corporate tax rates

We investigate whether the impact of higher corporate tax rates on foreign direct investment (FDI), at home or abroad, depends on the external financial dependence of a given sector. By structurally relying on debt for the funding of their operations, firms operating in externally dependent (ED) sectors in OECD countries benefit from the tax shield provided by the tax-deductibility of debt interest payments. We conjecture that this tax advantage is likely to make them less sensitive to changes in home and host countries’ corporate tax rates than firms in non-ED sectors when engaging in FDI. Using a new proprietary data on bilateral greenfield manufacturing FDI in OECD countries over the period 2003 to 2010, we find empirical support for this hypothesis as firms operating in externally dependent sectors appear to be much less sensitive to home and host corporate tax rates than firms operating in nonexternally dependent sectors.