Search Results
Journal Article
Direct investment activity of foreign firms
Working Paper
Risk, returns, and multinational production
This paper starts by unveiling a new empirical regularity: multinational corporations systematically tend to exhibit higher stock market returns and earnings yields than non-multinational firms. Within non-multinationals, exporters tend to exhibit higher earnings yields and returns than firms selling only in their domestic market. To explain this pattern, we develop a real option value model where firms are heterogeneous in productivity, and have to decide whether and how to sell in a foreign market where demand is risky. Firms can serve the foreign market through trade or foreign direct ...
Journal Article
Foreign, Inc.
Working Paper
Does multinationality matter? Evidence of value destruction in U.S. multinational corporations
We document that capital markets penalize corporate multinationality by putting a lower value on the equity of multinational corporations than on otherwise similar domestic corporations. Using Tobin's q, the multinational discount is estimated to be in the range of 8.6% to 17.1%. The most important mechanism of value destruction is an asset channel in which multinationals have disproportionately high levels of assets in relation to the earnings they generate. Foreign assets are particularly associated with value destruction. In contrast, exporting from U.S. operations is associated with an ...
Report
Resolving troubled systemically important cross-border financial institutions: is a new corporate organizational form required?
This paper explores the advantages of a new financial charter for large, complex, internationally active financial institutions that would address the corporate governance challenges of such organizations, including incentive problems in risk decisions and the complicated corporate and regulatory structures that impede cross-border resolutions. The charter envisions a single entity with broad powers in which the extent and timing of compensation are tied to financial results, senior managers and risk takers form a new risk-bearing stakeholder class, and a home-country-based resolution regime ...
Working Paper
How does multinational production change international comovement?
I study the aggregate implications of the entry of Multinational Firms (MNFs) in a two country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model in which firms have heterogeneous productivity in the sense of Ghironi and Melitz (2005). Unlike the extant open economy macroeconomics literature, this model endogenizes both multinational production and exports as possible strategies of internationalization of production, a feature that substantially improves the match between model-simulated moments and business cycle data along two dimensions. First, once I allow for concurrent entry (and exit) of ...
Working Paper
Interactions between domestic and foreign investment
This paper studies both the domestic and foreign fixed investment expenditures of a sample of U. S. multinational firms. In addition to explaining empirically each type of investment, an important goal is to determine whether there are significant interactions between expenditures in the different locations. ; Two types of interaction--one, financial, and the other, production-based--are explored theoretically and empirically. The financial interaction is the result of a model which assumes a risk of bankruptcy and its associated costs; under these circumstances, the firm faces an increasing ...
Working Paper
Core competencies and the structure of foreign direct investment
We develop a matching model of foreign direct investment to study how multinational firms choose between greenfield investment, acquisitions, and joint ventures. For all entry modes, firms must invest in a continuum of tasks to bring a product to market. Each firm possesses a core competency in the task space, though firms are otherwise identical. For acquisitions and joint ventures, a multinational enterprise (MNE) must match with a local partner, where the local partner may provide complementary expertise within the task space. However, for joint ventures, investment in tasks is shared by ...