This paper investigates the effects on Chinese firms of Outward FDI into advanced European countries. The results provide robust evidence supporting the view that China‟s OFDI so far have had a positive impact on domestic activities in enhancing firms‟ productivity and scales of operation, measured by sales and employment. Featured in The Economist, September 12th 2015.
AIB Insights has published an article written in collaboration with Cristina Chaminade on Technology Driven FDI by Emerging Multinationals in Europe.
The phenomenon of Emerging Economy Multinational Enterprises (EMNEs) and their internationalization process have sparked the debate over the appropriateness of International Business theories to study EMNEs’ internationalization processes. The literature has extensively investigated what distinguishes EMNEs from Advanced Country Multinational Enterprises (AMNEs). This review summarizes and discusses some of the issues that have mostly attracted scholarly debate in this research area.
This paper looks at the location choices of MNEs in the European Union (EU-25) regions and unveils that EMNEs follow distinctive location strategies. Their attraction into large regional markets is similar to AMNEs as well as their irresponsiveness to efficiency seeking motives. Conversely, the most knowledge-intensive investments respond mainly to strategic assets and the agglomeration of foreign investments in the same business functions.
In this paper we undertake an empirical analysis of Chinese and Indian FDIs in Europe to investigate their identity and characteristics and the association between these features and their international business strategies. We exploit a dataset at the level of the investing firms. In relation to mode of entry, we find that the greenfield is a more likely option for large-sized companies, and that weak propensity for innovation is associated with a low probability to enter through a merger or acquisition. A high propensity for innovation is related to asset-seeking FDI, while high profitability is needed to invest in the core EU countries.
Using a new firm-level database, EMENDATA, this paper investigates the effects on Chinese multinational enterprises of Outward FDI (OFDI) into advanced European countries. Propensity score matching is combined with a difference-in-difference estimator to reduce the problems of self-selection of treated firms in foreign markets. The results provide robust evidence in support of the view that China’s OFDI had so far a positive impact on domestic activities in enhancing firms’ productivity and scales of operation.
The empirical literature on China’s outward foreign direct investment mainly relies on aggregate data from official statistics, but the reliability of such data is currently a matter of concern because it does not take account of relevant features such as industry breakdown, ownership structure and entry mode. A novel firm-level database, EMENDATA, compiled by matching data from several available sources on various types of cross-border deals and including information on group structure, provides a more accurate picture and enables new empirical analyses of the rapidly increasing presence of Chinese companies abroad.
An article about emerging multinationals investing in Europe and their impact on the local economy written with Elisa Giuliani. We investigate how subsidiaries of multinationals from both emerging (EMNEs) and advanced (AMNEs) economies investing in Europe learn from the local context and contribute to it as much as they benefit from it. There are EMNE subsidiaries that contribute through their significant local innovative efforts to development processes in the host country. This suggests possible win-win situations from which novel policy implications may be drawn.
With Alessia Amighini and Claudio Cozza I wrote an article on emerging multinationals investing in Europe. Tito Boeri wrote about this article in Internazionale.
The present paper is about the ownership choices by Emerging Market Multinational Enterprises (EMNEs) when they invest in Europe through M&As, and the relationship with the main motivations underlying their international expansion. Namely, we claim that EMNEs prefer to acquire less control and keep the local partner when they invest for seeking knowledge. Additionally, EMNEs choose partial acquisitions in case of high dissimilarity in terms of culture, industry and knowledge base.
Our empirical analysis relies on a dataset of M&As undertaken by Chinese and Indian MNEs in high and medium-high tech sectors, in the period 2003-2011. We use content analysis of public announcements and company reports for classifying the main motivation of the acquisitions, and econometric analysis for testing our hypotheses. Our results confirm the expectations.