Two essays on foreign direct investment

Abstract

This thesis includes two chapters investigating issues related to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). In the first chapter, I exploit one of the most important conflicts of the 20th century between what are currently the world's second and third largest economies, the Japanese invasion of China from 1937 to 1945, to investigate the long-run impact of conflicts among countries on cross-border trade and investment. I find that Japanese multinationals are less likely to invest in Chinese regions that suffered greater civilian casualties during the Japanese invasion, and these regions also trade less with Japan. This study shows that historical animosity still matters for international trade and investment, despite the trend toward a flat world. In the second chapter, by using an extensive data set on foreign invested enterprises (FIEs) in the Chinese mainland, I employ discrete choice model developed by McFadden (1974) to examine the factors determining the locational choices of FDI. Our empirical analysis shows that FIEs from source countries that are more remote institutionally from the Chinese mainland exhibit a higher degree of sensitivity toward regional economic institutions in their choice of FDI location. Interestingly, we also detect a pattern of asymmetric sensitivity toward institutional quality, i.e., FIEs coming from countries with better institutions than China are more sensitive to institutional difference and there is no effect of institutional difference on FIEs from countries with worse institutions than China. Institutional distance could also cast differentiated impacts on location choice by Joint Ventures (JVs) and Wholly-owned Enterprises (WOEs), FIEs coming from the source countries with high proportion of ethnic Chinese and FIEs coming from source countries with low proportion of ethnic Chinese in their overall populations.