We use Japanese microdata to examine how financial market frictions affect foreign direct investment (FDI). The Japanese land price bubble and banking trouble in the late 1980s and early 1990s serve as a quasi natural experiment to identify two possible transmission channels from financial...

This paper argues that the large reduction in corporate tax rates and only gradual widening of tax bases in many countries over the last decades are consistent with tougher international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI). To make this point we develop a model in which governments...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in services has grown significantly in recent years. Evidence of spatial relationships in FDI decisions have been provided for goods manufacturing by utilizing physical distance-based measures of trade costs. This paper investigates spatial interactions for...

We address the role of labor cost differentials for national tax policies. Using a simple theoretical framework with two countries competing for a mobile firm, we show that in a bidding race for FDI, it is optimal for governments to compensate firms for international labor cost differentials....

The literature has documented a positive effect of foreign ownership on firm performance. But is this effect due to a one-time knowledge transfer or does it rely on continuous injections of knowledge? To shed light on this question we focus on divestments, that is, foreign affiliates that are...

Until 2009, the United Kingdom operated a system of worldwide taxation. Taxation of foreign income was deferred until repatriated as dividends, leaving UK-owned multinational firms the possibility of avoiding UK taxation by delaying dividend payments and keeping earnings abroad. In 2009, the UK...

We provide an alternative explanation for the commonly observed FDI in developed countries (DCs) considering a vertically related market structure and endogenizing vertical technology transfer (VTT). We show that even though VTT is more costly in a less developed country (LDC), a multinational...

We study a multinational enterprise’s (MNE) choice of foreign direct investment (FDI) mode in a vertically related market with local input sourcing. We show that the vertical structure of the market and its features play a crucial role for the MNE.s decision: backward linkages, enhanced...

We examine how foreign ownership of a firm affects the variety of goods that the firm exports and the number of countries it trades with. We construct a simple theoretical model of how foreign ownership may affect these extensive margins of exports and take this model to data from Germany, one...

We analyze a model that focuses on the export/outsource decision. Outsourcing has the advantage of providing better information about local preferences. The disadvantage is that producing in the host country also means using the inferior technology embodied in the local capital. The decision of...