Opportunism, Corruption and the Multinational Firm’s Mode of Entry

The paper models the boundaries of the multinational firm by looking at a simple trade-off between FDI (internal expansion with strong control rights) and debt (arm’s length expansion with loose control rights) in the context of contractual incompleteness due to institutional constraints in host countries, i.e. problems of commitment and, especially, corruption. It develops a theoretical approach to the two main types of corruption: petty bureaucratic corruption and high-level political corruption. The model predicts that multinational firms prefer FDI the weaker the ability to commit of the host country, while both types of corruption shift the trade-off marginally toward debt. Cross-country panel empirical evidence supports these conclusions.