Effects of Foreign Direct Investment on Firm-level Technical Efficiency: Stochastic Frontier Model Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms

It has been recognized that multinational corporations can spill over to non-affiliated firms in host economies. Existing studies of foreign direct investment (FDI) and productivity growth often assume firms are perfectly efficient. Our paper relaxes this assumption and explores how FDI affects a firm’s technical efficiency improvement as well as its technical progress in a stochastic frontier model. The stochastic frontier model estimates a firm’s production frontier given a set of production inputs. The deviation of a firm’s actual output level from its maximum level of output is defined as technical inefficiency. Using data from more than 12,000 Chinese manufacturing firms, we find that FDI in a firm\u27s own industry (horizontal FDI) does not necessarily improve the firm’s technical efficiency. However, firms with a larger absorptive capacity tend to benefit more from horizontal FDI than others. We also find that foreign presence in a firm’s downstream industries helps improve the firm’s technical efficiency, while foreign presence in upstream industries does not. In addition, a generalized Malmquist index decomposition shows that foreign affiliates achieve a higher productivity growth than domestic firms mainly through a faster improvement in technical efficiency rather than through technical progress

Rational Speculative Bubbles in the US Stock Market and Political Cycles

This paper tests the existence of rational speculative bubbles during Democratic and Republican presidential terms, which has not been systematically researched in existing studies. With monthly real returns on equally-weighted and value-weighted portfolios in the U.S. from January 1927 to December 2012, we find that there are rational speculative bubbles under Republican Presidents but not under Democratic Presidents. Our results are robust to different specifications

(WP 2004-01) Inappropriate Pooling of Wealthy and Poor Countries in Empirical FDI Studies

This paper examines the question of whether less-developed countries\u27 (LDCs\u27) experiences with foreign direct investment (FDI) systematically different from those of developed countries (DCs). We do this by examining three types of empirical FDI studies that typically do not distinguish between LDCs and DCs in their analysis. First, we find that the underlying factors that determine the location of FDI activity across countries vary systematically across LDCs and DCs in a way that is not captured by current empirical models of FDI. Second, the effect of FDI on economic growth is one that is only supported for LDCs in the aggregate data, not DCs. Third, the evidence suggests that FDI is much less likely to crowd out (more likely to crowd in) domestic investment for LDCs than DCs

Information Diffusion in a Cobweb World

Based on an assumption of one-way learning, Granato and Wong (2004) consider a framework with two groups of agents, Group L and Group H, where Group L is less attentive and uses the expectations of the more or highly attentive Group H to update their forecasts. The paper shows the boomerang effect, which is defined as a situation where the inaccurate forecasts of a less attentive group confound a more attentive group\u27s forecasts. This extended paper relaxes the one-way learning assumption and investigates the case that both groups are learning from each other, i.e., dual learning. Simulations suggest that a boomerang effect still exists. Surprisingly, although the highly attentive group has a full set of information to make forecasts, they still learn from Group L. The reason is that Group H adjusts their forecasts because there is available information in Group L\u27s forecast measurement error

Inward FDI, Remittances, and Out-migration

In this study, we look at the relationship between remittances received at home, inward Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and out-migration of individuals with different levels of education. Using the bilateral international migration data in 1990 and 2000, we find that inward FDI tends to deter the out-migration of individuals with secondary and tertiary education, but has no significant impact on the out-migration of individuals with primary education. In addition, remittances received at home induce the out-migration of individuals with primary education, but not the out-migration of individuals with secondary and tertiary education. The stock of existing migrants in a foreign country encourage future out-migration regardless of migrants’ levels of education

Individual Attitudes toward the Impact of Multinational Corporations on Domestic Businesses: How Important are Individual Characteristics and Country-Level Traits?

We study the importance of individual characteristics and national factors influencing individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses. Our sample includes more than 40 000 respondents in 29 countries from the 2003 National Identity Survey conducted by the International Social Survey Programme. We find that individual demographic factors and socioeconomic status, such as gender, age, income and education, are strong predictors of their attitudes. For example, income and education are positively associated with favourable attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on local businesses while age is negatively associated with individual attitudes towards MNCs. In addition, hierarchical ordered logit model results show that approximately 8% of total variations in individual attitudes around our sample mean are not explained by differences in personal traits. Instead, they are due to country-level heterogeneity such as, but not limited to, different degrees of openness or different aggregate income

Bank Efficiency and Regional Economic Growth: Evidence from China

This paper examines for the first time the relationship between bank efficiency and regional economic growth in China with provincial data over 1995 - 2014. We find consistent and strong evidence that bank efficiency positively affects regional economic growth. Further, bank efficiency exerts a more pronounced impact on economic growth in inland provinces than coastal regions. The insignificant effect of the quantity of credit in our regressions suggests that a mere expansion of financial volume is not effective in promoting regional economic growth, whereas the improvement in the quality of financial intermediation plays an important role fostering provincial economic growth