Tariff-Jumping and the Form of FDI: Firm Level Evidence

This paper carries out an empirical analysis with rich, firm-level data on the activities of Swedish multinationals around the globe in manufacturing sectors from 1987 to 1998 to test the main conjectures of traditional trade and recent views of the effects of trade costs on foreign entry. The results of the empirical analysis show almost no evidence of tariff-jumping foreign entry. On the contrary, high tariffs reduce the likelihood of cross-border M&As as conjectured by recent studies. At best, tariff-jumping is a possibility in the case of greenfield FDI or for large, multiple affiliate firms doing business in low-tech industries.foreign direct investment, entry modes, and tariff-jumping

North-South Integration and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment

We investigate how North-South Integration affects the location of FDI between the two regions. The theoretical analysis suggests that integration affects the incentives of partner and non-partner Northern countries to locate in the South differently and may lead to investment diversion from the Northern partner. We test our propositions using data from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first major North-South integration scheme. Using the largest possible control group, we use a difference-in-differences estimator to find that NAFTA partner FDI in Mexico has increased since the inception of NAFTA above what is implied by other determinants of FDI and the global upward trend during this time. Other countries have not increased their use of Mexico as an export platform. We also find no evidence that inward U.S. FDI has been diverted. The results are robust to a number of different model and econometric specifications as well as the skill data used

Business Cycles and Remittances: A Comparison of the Cases of Turkish Workers in Germany and Mexican Workers in the US

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North-South Integration and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment

We investigate how North-South Integration affects the location of FDI between the two regions. The theoretical analysis suggests that integration affects the incentives of partner and non-partner Northern countries to locate in the South differently and may lead to investment diversion from the Northern partner. We test our propositions using data from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first major North-South integration scheme. Using the largest possible control group, we use a difference-in-differences estimator to find that NAFTA partner FDI in Mexico has increased since the inception of NAFTA above what is implied by other determinants of FDI and the global upward trend during this time. Other countries have not increased their use of Mexico as an export platform. We also find no evidence that inward U.S. FDI has been diverted. The results are robust to a number of different model and econometric specifications as well as the skill data used.Foreign Direct Investment, Multinationals, Export Platform, NAFTA

Remittances, Business Cycles and Poverty: The Recent Turkish Experience

We investigate whether remittances sent to Turkey by Turkish workers living in Germany are countercyclical or procyclical with Turkish and German national outputs and discuss the possible reasons underlying the resulting patterns and their implications. We also take up a previously unexplored issue and discuss poverty alleviation potential of remittances at a macroeconomic level by examining the statistical properties of any co-movements between remittances cycles and cycles in consumption spending on food and durable goods in Turkey. Our results reveal that the real remittance flows from Germany to Turkey move procyclically with the real output in Turkey, and are primarily driven by (largely independent of) the developments in the Turkish economy (German economy). We also find that remittances cycles remain procyclical to the consumption cycles throughout our sample period. This direct co-movement between the two cycles becomes synchronous, however, only after a phase shift occurring around 1992, pointing to the increasing role of the level of economic activity in Turkey as the leading determinant of remittance receipts from Germany and the declining strength of consumption smoothing motive over time. Our results all together point out a low potential for remittances sent from Germany to reduce poverty in Turkey, at least as far as the past fifteen years are concerned.Remittances, International migration, Business cycles and poverty

North American Integration and Canadian Foreign Direct Investment

We investigate how economic integration in North America has altered the pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI) to and from Canada. The theoretical analysis suggests that while the Canadian-U.S. free trade agreement should generate less FDI, the addition of Mexico in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) produces the opposite effect. The fall in trade costs results in investment diversion from the U.S. and Canada, yet lower fixed costs may increase FDI even in those countries via an increased incentive to locate production facilities abroad rather than only domestically. Using a difference-in-differences estimator, we find that U.S. FDI in Canada as well as Canadian FDI in the U.S. have expanded disproportionately since NAFTA, suggesting that the latter effect dominates.Foreign Direct Investment, Multinationals, NAFTA, Canada

Controller design for haptic systems under delayed position and velocity feedback

Ankara : The Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Sciences of Bilkent University, 2012.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2012.Includes bibliographical refences.This thesis considers controller design for haptic systems under delayed position and velocity feedback. More precisely, a complete stability analysis of a haptic system, where local dynamics are described by some second-order mechanical dynamics, is presented. Characteristic equation of this system with time delays involves quasipolynomials. By a change of variables in the characteristic equation, stability conditions are obtained analytically and regions are plotted by using Matlab. Next, using two optimization techniques (H∞ and stability margin optimization) optimal choice for the controller gains is proposed. H∞ optimization minimizes tracking error between devices while avoiding large control action inputs. H∞ analysis requires high computational cost for accurate results due to its dependency to frequency domain. On the other hand, stability margin optimization defines a cost function that expresses the trade-off between system bandwidth and robustness with low computational cost. The derived results are tested on a three degree of freedom real-time experimental platform to illustrate the theoretical results. Finally robustness analysis is performed for optimal parameters to find allowable delay perturbationsKoru, Ahmet TahaM.S

The Effect of Tax Treaties on Multinational Firms: New Evidence from Microdata

This paper uses affiliate level data from Swedish multinationals to examine the impact of tax treaties on both overall affiliate sales and the composition of those sales. In line with previous results, we find little evidence for an effect of treaties on the level of total sales. We do, however, find that a tax treaty increases the probability of investment by a firm in a given country. In addition, we find that a treaty reduces exports to the parent but increases imports of intermediate inputs from the parent. This is consistent with treaties increasing the effective host tax. This suggests that tax treaties impact the behavior of multinationals along some dimensions but not along others.Tax Treaties, Multinational Firms, Foreign Direct Investment