When a multinational firm invests in a country, potential host states compete for the firm by offering firm-specific tax reductions. Critics blast such incentives as a prisoner's dilemma that transfers rents to the firm without affecting the investment decision. In fact, these incentives are...

The individual states within the United States offer numerous incentives to entice international investment even though the effectiveness of doing so is unclear. Examining their effectiveness, we find that coastal states that offer more incentives do receive a greater annual share of foreign...

This paper investigates the impact of the corporate income tax on the geographical distribution of French firms Foreign Direct Investment port- folio across 26 European countries. The empirical assessment is based on Baldwin (1999) new economic geography model in which we focus on the location...

The main focus of this paper is to examine the impact of intellectual property rights (IPRs) and economic freedom of the world (EFW) on inward foreign direct investment (FDI) in a panel of fourteen developing South Asian and Southeast Asian countries over the period 1970-2005. We find that...

This paper analyzes the impact of contract-related risk factors on inward foreign direct investment. We presume that risk related determinants enter directly the cost function of multinationals. For a sample of 50 developed and less developed countries and the time period 1985-1997 we find a...

A national authority wishes to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to create local jobs. We analyse the optimal national trade policy when local authorities might offer subsidies to convince a multi-national enterprise (MNE) to invest in their jurisdiction. With centralised decision-making...

This study investigates factors determining the location of foreign direct investments (FDI) in Sweden. The main purpose is to examine the link between FDI and public incentives, in the form of regional grants, which make up a central part of the Swedish regional policy and state expenditures...

Using a large international firm-level data set, we examine the separate effects of host and additional parent country taxation on the location decisions of multinational firms. Both types of taxation are estimated to have a negative impact on the location of new foreign subsidiaries. The impact...

This paper estimates the extent to which stringent environmental standards in some U.S. states have deterred foreign direct investment (FDI). It addresses three shortcomings in the existing literature on the economic effects of environmental regulations. First, it avoids comparing regulations in...

This paper adds to the scarce cross-country evidence on FDI location decisions between the EU-15 Member States and the ten new Members that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007 from the Central and East European Countries (CEECs). To capture the discrete nature of the location choice,...