Foreign direct investment in services.

摘要

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has grown substantially over the last two decades. A great deal of empirical and theoretical research has been done investigating manufacturing FDI, yet there has been remarkably little work examining FDI in producer services. This is surprising since producer services in the United States now account for nearly 60% of total outward FDI. This dissertation investigates FDI in producer services from a theoretical and empirical perspective.;The theoretical model focuses on the informational barriers to entry that service firms encounter in foreign markets, and on the interactions between producer services and manufacturing FDI. The model predicts, among other things, that a business service firm can overcome informational barriers in the foreign market more easily if manufacturers from its own country have already invested there. In particular, foreign market size has a greater influence on the service FDI if there is a critical level of manufacturing FDI in the foreign market. The theory is empirically tested by examining the FDI of four U.S. service industries (wholesale trade, business services, banking, and financial services) into 23 host countries from 1976 to 1995. The model's predictions are shown to be consistent with the data for business services. The results of the regressions for wholesale trade suggest that wholesalers locate their foreign operations wherever U.S. exports are demanded by the foreign market and informational barriers do not appear to be important.;Using the same reduced-form model for banking and financial industries leads to counterintuitive results. Further work suggests that the counterintuitive results are driven by the aggregated nature of the data. When the data is disaggregated to the extent possible, the results indicate that banks do follow manufacturers abroad, but may not locate in the same country. Instead they tend to locate in the same region.