Transportation Cost and the Geography of Foreign Investment

Laura  Alfaro; Maggie  Chen

Chapter | Handbook of International Trade and Transportation | 2018

Transportation Cost and the Geography of Foreign Investment

by Laura Alfaro and Maggie Chen

Abstract

Falling transportation costs and rapid technological progress in recent decades have precipitated an explosion of cross-border flows in goods, services, investments, and ideas led by multinational firms. Extensive research has sought to understand the geographic patterns of foreign direct investment (FDI). This chapter reviews existing theories and evidence specifically addressing questions including: How is FDI distributed across space? Why does the law of gravity apply? How do the costs of transporting goods, tasks, and technologies influence firms’ decisions to separate tasks geographically and locate relative to one another? We discuss a variety of theoretical mechanisms through which transport cost and other geographic friction influence FDI and present the key empirical studies and findings.

Keywords: Foreign Direct Investment; Cost; Transportation; Geographic Scope; Geographic Location;

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Citation:

Alfaro, Laura, and Maggie Chen. "Transportation Cost and the Geography of Foreign Investment." In Handbook of International Trade and Transportation, edited by Bruce Blonigen and Wesley W. Wilson. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018.

Propagation through buyer-seller interactions may amplify the aggregate impact of bank lending shocks on real activity. This column presents insights from estimating the direct and indirect effects of exogenous credit supply shocks in Spain between 2002 and 2013. Both direct and indirect effects of bank credit shocks had sizable effects on investment and output throughout the period. Trade credit extended by suppliers and price adjustments both appear to explain downstream propagation of financial shocks.

Article | American Economic Journal: Economic Policy | May 2018

Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production

Laura Alfaro and Maggie X. Chen

Assessing the productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive aggregate productivity gains are often attributed to within-firm productivity improvement; however, an alternative, less emphasized explanation is between-firm selection and market reallocation, whereby competition from multinationals leads to factor reallocation and the survival of only the most productive domestic firms. We investigate the roles of the two different mechanisms in determining the aggregate productivity gains by exploring their distinct predictions on the distributions of domestic firms: within-firm productivity improvement shifts the productivity and revenue distributions rightward while between-firm selection and market reallocation raise the left truncation of the distributions and shift revenue leftward. Using a rich cross-country firm-level panel dataset, we find significant evidence of both mechanisms, but between-firm selection and market reallocation accounts for the majority of aggregate productivity gains, suggesting that ignoring this channel could lead to substantial bias in understanding the nature of gains from multinational production.

Keywords: Productivity gains; multinational production; selection; Market Reallocation; and within-firm productivity; Multinational Firms and Management; Production; Performance Productivity; Competition; Mathematical Methods;

Citation:

Alfaro, Laura, and Maggie X. Chen. "Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 10, no. 2 (May 2018): 1–38. (Also NBER Working Paper w18207. See Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 12–111, 2015 for longer version.) View Details

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Transportation Cost and the Geography of Foreign Investment

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