Many previous studies have shown that the localisation of firms can be an important factor in attracting new foreign direct investment into a host country. What has been missing in this literature thus far, however, is an investigation into the reasons why industry clusters attract firms. We...

Ireland’s dramatic economic boom of the 1990s has been referred to as “the era of the Celtic Tiger”. In a little over a decade, real national income per head jumped from 65 percent of the Western European average to above parity, unemployment tumbled from double to less than half the...

Typically, a small and open economy trades goods at given world prices. Here, we present a model of a very open small economy, where capital and labor are internationally mobile, too. When investing into infrastructure, the economy’s government attracts not only mobile capital but mobile...

FDI and the activities of foreign affiliate firms have grown dramatically in recent decades, both in absolute terms and as a share of world GDP. Most explanations of this phenomenon focus on the impact of the macroeconomic environment on the choices facing individual firms over whether or not to...

I outline the effect of business networks on trade, FDI and wel- fare in a two-country, two-firm duopoly. The network effect, following Greaney (2002), is modelled as a marginal cost disadvantage facing a firm from Foreign in selling to Home. Unlike traditional trade costs, this cost cannot be...

We suggest that public housing matters for FDI. We assume that FDI creates gains for some residents and losses for others. Losers from FDI will oppose FDI. To win support for FDI, local government may want to pay compensation in cash. In the paper’s model, however, cash payments are not...

Relying on a large foreign direct investment (FDI) transaction level dataset, unique both in terms of disaggregation and time and country coverage, this paper examines patterns in greenfield (GF) versus merger & acquisition (MA) investment. Although both are found to seek out large markets with...

This paper examines the effect that a country’s business regulatory environment has on the amount of foreign direct investment it attracts. We use the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business ranking to capture the costs that firms face when operating in a country. Several interesting results...