This paper studies why multinational firms often share ownership of a foreign affiliate with a local partner even in the absence of government restrictions on ownership. We show that shared ownership may arise, if (i) the partner owns assets that are potentially important for the investment...

The previous literature provides a highly ambiguous picture on the impact of trade and investment agreements on FDI. Most empirical studies ignore the actual content of BITs and RTAs, treating them as "black boxes", despite the diversity of investment provisions constituting the essence of these...

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...

We focus on investor-state dispute settlement provisions contained in various, though far from all, bilateral investment treaties as a possible determinant of BIT-related effects on bilateral FDI flows. Our estimation results prove to be sensitive to the specification of these provisions as well...