On 29th January I gave a key note speech at the 3rd Geography of Innovation Conference in Toulouse.
We study Chinese and Indian multinationals investing in Europe investigating their identity, their characteristics and the association between their features and their international strategies. In relation to the mode of entry, we find that greenfield investments are a more likely option for large-sized companies. Moreover a high propensity for innovation is associated with a high probability to enter with an acquisition and with technological asset-seeking investments.
The article on The impact of outward FDI on the performance of Chinese Firms co-authored with Claudio Cozza and Marco Sanfilippo has been featured in The Economist, September 12th 2015.
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.
I participated in panel on The Challenge of Responding to the Increased Globalization of Economic Activities and Mobility of Talent at Circle 10th Anniversary Seminar.
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A paper by Rabellotti, together with Giuliani, Gorgoni and Guenther, was reviewed in the Rising Powers Blog.
It empirically investigates 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. To explore this we classify the behavior of MNE subsidiaries into different typologies on the basis of how knowledge is transferred within the multinational and on the nature of the local innovative connections. The empirical analysis relies on an entirely new, subsidiary-level dataset in the industrial machinery sector in Italy and Germany. Results show that EMNEs and AMNEs undertake different strategies for tapping into local knowledge and for transferring it within the company. We identify a new typology of EMNE subsidiary that contributes through its significant local innovative efforts to development processes in the host country. This result suggests possible win-win situations from which novel policy implications may be drawn.
The article has been reviewed in the Rising Powers Blog.
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 empirical literature on China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) mainly relies on aggregate data from official statistics, whose international reliability is currently a matter of concern, not taking account some relevant features such as the industry breakdowns, ownership structures and modes of entry. 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, enables new empirical analyses and provides new insights into the rapidly increasing presence of Chinese companies abroad. In this paper, exploring the potential of this database we offer an informative and comprehensive assessment of the geographical and specialization patterns of Chinese outward FDI into Europe and suggest new avenues for further research on this highly policy relevant issue.
It investigates the geography of multinational companies’ investments in the EU regions. The ‘traditional’ sources of location advantages (i.e. agglomeration economies, market access and labour market conditions) are considered together with innovation and socio-institutional drivers of investments, captured by means of regional “social filter” conditions. This makes it possible to empirically assess the different role played by such advantages in the location decision of investments at different stages of the value chain and disentangle the differential role of national vs. regional factors. The empirical analysis covers the EU-25 regions and suggests that regional socio- economic conditions are crucially important for the location decisions of investments in the most sophisticated knowledge-intensive stages of the value chain.