Instruments of risk mitigation play an important role in managing country risk within the foreign direct investment (FDI) decision. Our study assesses country risk by state-dependent preferences and introduces futures contracts as a tool of risk mitigation. We show that country risk assessments...

Economic theory provides two main explanations why changes in exchange rates can affect foreign direct investment (FDI). According to a first explanation, FDI reacts to exchange rate changes if there are information frictions on capital markets and if the investment by firms depends on their net...

This paper analyses the national tax treatment of interestexpenditures of multinational enterprises in a non-cooperative world. It is shown that the international tax systemgenerally leads to distortions in the capitaldecisions of multinational firms. In contrast to the existingliterature on the...

To serve foreign markets, firms can either export or set up a local subsidiary through horizontal Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The conventional proximity-concentration theory suggests that FDI substitutes for trade if distance between countries is large, while exports become more important...

According to the ‘convergence hypothesis’, multinational companies will tend to displace national firms and trade as total market size increases and as countries converge in relative size, factor endowments, and production costs. Using a recent model developed by Markusen and Venables (1998)...

We propose a simple model to analyze the widespread idea that a necessary condition for firms to make foreign direct investments is that they have firm-specific advantages with respect to host country firms. We show that no such advantages are necessary to become multinationals. Further, firms...

This paper contributes to research endogenizing multinational firms in general-equilibrium trade models. We attempt to integrate separate contributions on horizontal multinationals which produce the same final product in multiple locations, with work on vertical multinationals, which...

This article argues that the body of foreign direct investment (FDI) literature in general and the ownership, location, and internalization (OLI) paradigm in particular would be enriched if finance-specific factors are explicitly incorporated as drivers of FDI. We suggest that financial...

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...

This paper models a multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) as a coordination device. Multinational enterprises can invest in any number of countries. Without a multilateral investment agreement, expropriation triggers an investment stop by the single MNE. Under a multilateral agreement,...