Thibault Fally

Global Sourcing Under Imperfect Capital Markets

We develop a simple model to study the interactions between a supplier’s financial constraints and contract incompleteness in a vertical relationship. Production complexity increases the extent of contract incompleteness and the hold-up problem, which generates a cost when the supplier needs financial participation from the downstream firm. Vertical integration alleviates the impact of financial constraints but reduces the supplier’s incentives. We apply the model to an analysis of multinational firms’ sourcing strategies and predict that (1) complex and specific inputs are more likely to be sourced from financially developed countries and (2) multinationals are more likely to integrate suppliers located in countries with poor financial institutions, especially when trade involves complex goods. We examine and validate these predictions using firm-level trade data on multinational firms with operations in France. We provide evidence that financial development generates a comparative advantage in the supply of complex goods. Moreover, we find higher shares of intra-firm imports of complex inputs from countries with a lower level of financial development. The findings are robust to different measures of complexity and specificity, and are not driven by industry differences in fixed costs or traditional measures of external financial dependence. Quantitatively, we find that financial development is as important as contract enforcement in alleviating hold-up problems.

Foreign entry and spillovers with technological incompatibilities in the supply chain

Does foreign entry improve host country productivity and welfare? Previous studies have looked at the role of backward linkages with domestic suppliers and their effects on domestic competitors. In this paper, we study how these externalities are affected by technological incompatibilities between foreign and domestic technologies. When foreign technologies require specialized inputs, some local suppliers self-select into production for multinational firms. A decrease in the cost of inputs compatible with the foreign technology has heterogeneous effects. It benefits foreign firms and the most productive downstream domestic firms that adopt the foreign technology, and negatively affects firms using the domestic technology. Technological incompatibilities reduce the welfare gains from openness to FDI, but this negative effect can be overcome by domestic technology adoption. The models predictions are consistent with the stylized facts drawn from the empirical literature on FDI spillovers.