Bruce A. Blonigen

University of Oregon | UO · Department of Economics

A proposed reason for the significant inverse relationship between distance (both physical and cultural) and foreign direct investment is the increased costs for a parent firm to monitor an affiliate when there is greater distance between them. We provide the first direct test of this hypothesis using O*NET data on occupational skills to construct...

The following sections are included: Introduction Literature Review A Model of Foreign Investment into China A Brief Descriptive Analysis of Exports and Unit Values over Time Empirical Analysis Conclusion Appendix References.

Empirical studies of bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) activity show substantial differences in specifications with little agreement on the set of included covariates. We use Bayesian statistical techniques that allow one to select from a large set of candidates those variables most likely to be determinants of FDI activity. The variables w...

This paper examines the tariff-jumping response of all firm and product combinations subject to US antidumping investigations from 1980 to 1990 using a newly constructed database. Previous studies have focused only on Japanese FDI responses to antidumping protection and found large tariff-jumping responses. In contrast, this paper finds quite modes...

This paper develops a model of cross-border M&A activity that features firm-level productivity shocks and endogenous export activity. We show that foreign firms will be relatively more attracted to targets in the domestic country that had high productivity levels that induced them to invest in large export networks several years prior to acquisitio...

Recent studies have used import data to assess the impact of foreign varieties on domestic prices and welfare. We employ a market-based data set on the U.S. automobile market that allows us to define goods varieties at a more precise level, as well as discern location of production and ownership of varieties. Our estimates of price and welfare chan...

Bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) are intended to promote foreign direct investment through double-taxation relief. Using BEA firm-level data, we find a positive effect of BTTs on FDI, which is larger for firms that use differentiated inputs. BTTs allow multinational firms to request assistance from treaty partners' governments if they have a grievance...

The political economy of trade protection has long been of interest to economists and policy makers. The idea that levels of protection may be endogenous with trade flows has been a particularly important issue in the literature. In general, the endogenous protection literature postulates that import penetration will cause domestic interests to lob...

Studies of trade policy welfare effects often ignore the potential for tariff-jumping foreign direct investment (FDI) to mitigate positive gains to domestic producers. Using event study methodology we find that affirmative U.S. antidumping decisions are associated with average abnormal gains of over 3% to a firm in the petitioning industry in the a...

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using U.S. manufacturing data from 1977 to 1994, we find that inward FDI has...

There are a number of theoretical reasons why foreign direct investment (FDI) into a host country may depend on the FDI in proximate countries. Such spatial interdependence has been largely ignored by the empirical FDI literature, with only a couple recent papers accounting for such issues in their estimation. This paper conducts a general examinat...

Are foreign production and exports substitutes or complements? Standard theory of the multinational corporation (MNC) assumes substitution, while previous empirical work examining the relationship has generally found strong evidence of complementarity. This study examines product-level data, which more closely fits the assumption of a single-produc...

Little evidence exists on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on local communities in the United States, despite evidence that U.S. communities actively bid against each other for FDI. We use detailed county-level panel data from South Carolina across 5-year intervals from 1980 through 1995 to investigate the effect of foreign manufactur...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) theory and empirical studies have generated mixed support for a link between exchange rates and FDI. This paper argues that exchange rate movements may affect acquisition FDI because acquisitions involve firm-specific assets which can generate returns in currencies other than that used for purchase. Using data on Jap...

We introduce the possibility of foreign direct investment (FDI) in a strategic, oligopolistic setting with endogenous protection and find that a number of unique subgame-perfect equilibria may arise, including a new result we call "protection-building trade." This phenomenon occurs in our model when foreign firms locating production in the home cou...

Study of the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on productivity and market power has been complicated by the difficulty of separating these two effects. We use newly-developed techniques to separately estimate productivity and markups across a wide range of industries using detailed plant-level data. Employing a difference-in-differences fra...

The majority of the world's countries have antidumping (AD) statutes in place, hundreds of AD actions occur annually across these countries, and AD criteria and procedures have been codified in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its successor, the World Trade Organization. AD's unique characteristics along with its high incidence of use...

Study of the impact of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on productivity and market power has been complicated by the difficulty of separating these two effects. We use newly-developed techniques to separately estimate productivity and markups across a wide range of industries using confidential data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Employing a differenc...

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the role of air services. This paper exploits the large and swift changes to air traffic induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to identify the link between air traffic and local economic growth. Using data for 263 Metropolita...

This paper develops a model of cross-border M&A activity that features firm-level productivity shocks and endogenous export activity. We show that foreign firms will be relatively more attracted to targets in the domestic country that had high productivity levels that induced them to invest in large export networks several years prior to acquisitio...

Understanding the formation of individual trade policy preferences is a fundamental input into the modeling of trade policy outcomes. Surprisingly, past studies have found mixed evidence that various labor market and industry attributes of workers affect their trade policy preferences, even though recent studies have found that trade policy can hav...

Bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) are intended to promote foreign direct investment through double-taxation relief. Using BEA firm-level data, we find a positive effect of BTTs on FDI, which is larger for firms that use differentiated inputs. BTTs allow multinational firms to request assistance from treaty partners' governments if they have a grievance...

Over the last 40 years, there has been an unprecedented growth in trade amongst countries, and the growth in trade shows no sign of slowing down. The increases in trade have put tremendous pressure on the maritime and port industries, and these industries have responded with innovations, investment, and greater productivity. International trade and...

There is significant debate over the effect of the Interstate Commerce Act (ICA) on the cost of rail transport to shippers. Taking price differences across locations as proxy for transport costs, we use data on wheat prices before and after the implementation of the ICA to see if the Act led to smaller differences in wheat prices across American ci...

We present and examine a novel data set that contains production line information inside US steel plants. We exploit this highly disaggregated data to perform the first study of entry and exit behavior at the level of the production line within individual plants. Our empirical analysis reveals a number of interesting results. First, smaller product...

Product redesigns happen across virtually all types of products. While there is substantial evidence that new varieties of goods increase welfare, there is little evidence on the effect of product redesigns. We develop a model of redesign and exit decisions in a dynamic oligopoly model (a la Bajari et al (2007)) and use it to analyse redesign activ...

Industrial policies (IPs) include such varying practices as production subsidies, export subsidies, and import protection, and are commonly used by countries to promote targeted sectors. However, such policies can have significant impacts on sectors other than those targeted by the IPs, particularly when the target sector produces goods that are ke...

This paper develops a dynamic model of cross-border M&A activity. We show that foreign firms will be relatively more attracted to targets in the domestic country that had high productivity levels several years prior to acquisition, but then suffered a negative productivity shock (i.e., cherries for sale). With high ex ante productivity levels, targ...

While significant work has been done to examine the determinants of regional development, there is little evidence on the contribution of air services toward this outcome. This paper exploits the unexpected market changes induced by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act to bring new evidence on the link between airline traffic and local economic growth...

It has long been recognized that business cycle comovement is greater between countries that trade intensively with one another. Surprisingly, no one has previously examined the relationship between trade intensity and comovement of shocks to the trend level of output. Contrary to the result for cyclical fluctuations, we find that comovement of sho...

Over the past 50 years, the steel industry has been protected by a wide variety of trade policies, both tariff- and quota-based. We exploit this extensive heterogeneity in trade protection to examine the well-established theoretical literature predicting nonequivalent effects of tariffs and quotas on domestic firms' market power. Using plant-level...

Over the past 50 years, the steel industry has been protected by a wide variety of trade policies, both tariff- and quota-based. We exploit this extensive heterogeneity in trade protection to examine the well-established theoretical literature predicting nonequivalent effects of tariffs and quotas on domestic firms' market power. Using plant-level...

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Bilateral tax treaties (BTT) are intended to promote foreign direct investment and foreign affiliate activity through double taxation relief. However, BTTs also typically contain provisions that facilitate sharing of tax information between countries intended to curtail tax avoidance by multinational firms. These provisions should disproportionatel...

Past literature has found evidence that labor market attributes affect individuals' trade policy preferences in a manner consistent with theories of international trade. This paper shows that, with the exception of education, the relationships between labor market attributes and trade policy preferences are not robust in US survey data. This sugges...

The literature on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) and activities of multinational enterprises (MNEs) on host-countries has been almost exclusively focused on issues of productivity, growth and wages. We argue that this leaves quite a bit of important unexplored areas of inquiry, particularly those connected with the interactions of l...

Empirical studies of bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) activity show substantial differences in specifications with little agreement on the set of covariates that are (or should be) included. We use Bayesian statistical techniques that allow one to select from a large set of candidates those variables most likely to be determinants of FDI a...

Recent theoretical work suggests that the presence of foreign direct investment (FDI) lowers a country’s noncooperative Nash tariff. To test this hypothesis, we first adapt the theoretical model formulated by Blanchard (2010) to derive an intuitive, empirically testable equation. This equation is an augmentation of the standard formula equal to the...

Recent studies have used import data to assess the impact of foreign varieties on domestic prices and welfare. We employ a market-based data set on the U.S. automobile market that allows us to define goods varieties at a more precise level, as well as discern location of production and ownership of varieties. Our estimates of price and welfare chan...

The steel industry has been protected by a wide variety of trade policies, both tariff- and quota-based, over the past decades. This extensive heterogeneity in trade protection provides the opportunity to examine the well-established theoretical literature predicting nonequivalent effects of tariffs and quotas on domestic firms' market power. Robus...

This reply responds to a comment that correctly identifies an invalid assumption in our original article that antidumping (AD) duties are subtracted from the U.S. price when calculating AD duties in administrative reviews. While this point invalidates our theoretical explanation and empirical evidence on the magnitude of AD duty pass-through, it do...

Past literature has found evidence that labor market attributes affect individuals’ trade policy preferences in a manner consistent with theories of international trade. This paper shows that, with the exception of education, these relationships between labor market attributes and trade policy preferences are not robust in US survey data. This su...

This paper revisits the issue of people's preferences for international trade protection examining survey data from the American National Election Studies. I first show that both an individual's skills and the international trade characteristics of their employment industry affects their trade policy preferences, in contrast to previous analysis us...

In this paper we examine the impact of membership in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs) on trade between PTA members. Rather than considering the impact of PTA membership on the volume of trade we consider the impact of membership on the structure of trade. For a large sample of countries over the period 1962-2000 we find that membership in a PTA...

Top economists examine one of the key forces in globalization from a wide range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. The multinational firm and its main vehicle, foreign direct investment, are key forces in economic globalization. Their importance to the world economy can be seen in the fact that since 1990 foreign direct investment has grown...

Growing international trade and increasing congestion focus attention on trade facilitation. Ocean ports are a central and necessary component in facilitating trade. Yet, there is only limited comprehensive information available on the efficiency of ports or evidence of the effect of port efficiency on trade. We develop and apply a straightforward...

IntroductionTrends in the use of AntidumpingPre-Investigation IssuesIssues Related to the InvestigationWelfare Effects and Market Outcomes of Ad Trade ProtectionConclusion and Issues for Future Research

IntroductionEmpirical Framework for Statistical AnalysisDataStatistical Analysis and ResultsConclusion

The authors discuss how to use economic techniques to evaluate educational programs and show how to apply basic cost analysis to implementation of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS). A description of cost analysis concepts used for economic program evaluation is provided, emphasizing the suitability of these concepts for evaluating educa...

We examine the effects of trade liberalization on structural change by using Chilean plant-level and industry-level data. The traditional Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) model predicts an increase in capital-labor ratios in a labor abundant country after trade liberalization. This is in marked contrast to the implications of an otherwise similar model in whi...

Antidumping is a legal statute that allows for a remedy to offset the effects of dumped imports. Antidumping has emerged as the preferred method of trade protection, accounting for more disputes than all the other trade statutes combined. The economic rationale for current antidumping statutes is weak and generally inconsistent with competition pol...

A primary function of trade policy is to restrict imports to benefit the targeted domestic sector. However, a well-established theoretical literature highlights that the form of trade policy (e.g., quotas versus tariffs) can have a significant impact on how much trade policy affects firms’ abilities to price above marginal cost (i.e., market powe...

Competition for firms by region has a long-standing history, and the academic literature has debated whether such competition is efficient. We develop a model that explores technology development by firms facing regional competition for their investment and examine the endogenous determination of region policy, firm technology, and agglomeration ex...

Foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) account for well over half of all Chinese exports and this share continues to grow. While the substantial presence of FIEs has contributed greatly to the recent export-led growth of China, an important objective of the Chinese government is to ultimately obtain foreign technologies and develop their own technolog...

Abstract Using data on U.S. dumping margin calculations by the U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC), we first document the rapid rise in U.S. dumping margins from around 15% in the early 1980s to over 60% by 2000. Second, statistical analysis finds that USDOC discretionary practices have played the major role in rising U.S. dumping margins over this...

Rapid increases in international trade have led to congestion in many of the worlds' ports and have raised concern over the ability of transportation networks to handle the increased volumes. Increased volumes and the resulting congestion may impact trade flow patterns by affecting choices of importers and exporters. Trade flow patterns are most ce...

In this paper, we consider a three-stage game in the context of a competing exporters model to compare and contrast the effects of discriminatory and uniform (Most Favored Nation, MFN) tariffs on countries' choice over environmental standards for varying degrees of pollution spillovers. Because of the presence of punishment effects and stronger own...

Treatment of unfair trade laws has become an important topic in negotiations on preferential trading areas. Recent preferential trading areas involving the United States, one of the most significant users of these laws, have established special binational dispute settlement panels to arbitrate disagreements. Using a panel database of U.S. antidumpi...

The U.S. steel industry has long held that foreign subsidization and excess capacity has led to its long-run demise, yet no one has formally examined this hypothesis. In this paper, we incorporate foreign subsidization considerations into a model based on Staiger and Wolak's (1992) cyclical dumping framework and illustrate testable implications of...

Top economists examine one of the key forces in globalization from a wide range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. The multinational firm and its main vehicle, foreign direct investment, are key forces in economic globalization. Their importance to the world economy can be seen in the fact that since 1990 foreign direct investment has grown...

We show that industrial ownership structures, such as keiretsu groupings in Japan, may significantly impact firms' incentives to engage in FDI. While the previous literature has mainly focused on the cost of capital advantages enjoyed by keiretsu firms, this paper examines two relatively unexplored channels by which ownership structure matters for...

This paper surveys the recent burgeoning literature that empirically examines the foreign direct investment (FDI) decisions of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the resulting aggregate location of FDI across the world. The contribution of the paper is to evaluate what we can say with relative confidence about FDI as a profession, given the evide...

In this study, we estimate the impacts of differences in international tax rates on the probability of choosing a location for an affiliate of a multinational firm. In particular, we distinguish between the tax sensitivity of Greenfield and M&A investments. Based on a novel firm-level dataset on German outbound FDI, we find evidence that location d...

There are a number of theoretical reasons why foreign direct investment (FDI) into a host country may depend on the FDI in proximate countries. Such spatial interdependence has been largely ignored by the empirical FDI literature, with only a couple recent papers accounting for such issues in their estimation. This paper conducts a general examinat...

This paper takes the first systematic look at how prior experience by US firms in filing US AD petitions affects future AD filing activity and outcomes. Such prior experience may affect both the cost of filing petitions, as well as the likelihood of successful outcomes and dumping margin magnitudes. Statistical analysis of data on US AD cases finds...

This chapter presents the first estimates of the effects of bilateral treaties governing the taxation of foreign direct investment (FDI) on bilateral FDI activity. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section A discusses U.S. tax treaties including their history, how they are formed, and their key functions. Section B presents empirical methodology and...

This paper examines the question of whether less-developed countries' (LDCs') experiences with foreign direct investment (FDI) systematically different from those of developed countries (DCs). We do this by examining three types of empirical FDI studies that typically do not distinguish between LDCs and DCs in their analysis. First, we find that th...

Antidumping (AD) trade protection policies allow government agencies to recalculate AD duties based on foreign firms' most recent pricing behavior. We examine the resulting dynamic pricing problem of a foreign firm facing such policy. We show that the expected pattern of AD duty recalculations over time crucially depends on the foreign firm's ex an...

Studies of trade policy welfare effects often ignore the potential for tariff-jumping foreign direct investment (FDI) to mitigate positive gains to domestic producers. Using event study methodology we find that affirmative U.S. antidumping decisions are associated with average abnormal gains of over 3% to a firm in the petitioning industry in the a...

The effects of bilateral tax treaties on FDI activity have been unexplored, despite significant ongoing activities by countries to negotiate and ratify these treaties. This paper estimates the impact of bilateral tax treaties using both U.S. inbound and outbound FDI over the period 1980–1999. Robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications,...

The effects of bilateral tax treaties on FDI activity have been unexplored, despite significant ongoing activities by countries to negotiate and ratify these treaties. This paper estimates the impact of bilateral tax treaties using both U.S. inbound and outbound FDI over the period 1980--1999. Robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications,...

Keywords: Multinational Enterprises; Networking; Keiretsu; Agglomeration. JEL Classification: F23, G3.

Previous literature has discussed the procedural biases that exist in U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC) dumping margin calculations. This paper examines the evolution of discretionary practices and their role in the rapid increase in average USDOC dumping margins since 1980. Statistical analysis finds that USDOC discretionary practices have playe...

We argue that the costs of antidumping (AD) protection are substantially higher than standard tariff analysis would suggest. First, since AD duties are often adjusted during administrative reviews, the welfare cost of AD duties increases over time. These adjustments effectively transfer heavily distorted AD revenue to foreign firms. Second, AD duti...

This paper examines how the prospect of foreign retaliation affects the antidumping (AD) process in the United States. We separate the capacity for retaliation into two channels: (i) the capacity for foreign government retaliation under the dispute settlement procedures of the GATT/WTO system, and (ii) the capacity for foreign industry retaliation...

A recent American Economic Review article by David L. Carr, James R. Markusen, and Keith E. Maskus (CMM) estimates a regression specification based upon the 'knowledge-capital' model of the Multinational Enterprise (MNE). The knowledge-capital model combines 'horizontal' motivations for FDI -- the desire to place production close to customers and t...

Migration flows are shaped by a complex combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms. In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas (the stock of people born in a country and living in another one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set on internat...

Studies of trade policy welfare effects often ignore the potential for tariff-jumping foreign direct investment (FDI) to mitigate positive gains to domestic producers. Using event study methodology we find that affirmative U.S. antidumping decisions are associated with average abnormal gains of over 3% to a firm in the petitioning industry in the a...

This chapter provides some evidence on the effect of bilateral tax treaties on foreign direct investment (FDI) activity. Using Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) data, it shows that new treaty activity (during the 1983-1992 period) suggests strong negative impacts on FDI. Despite the positive correlation in the case of m...

Using a newly constructed database, this paper examines the tariff-jumping response of all firm and product combinations subject to U.S. AD investigations from 1980-1990. The results strongly support the hypothesis that tariff-jumping is only a realistic option for multinational firms from industrialized countries. Because many firms subject to U.S...

We review the growing literature on the effects of antidumping, a trade policy that has emerged as the most serious impediment to international trade. Over the past 25 years countries have increasingly turned to antidumping in order to offer protection to import-competing industries. Antidumping is a trade policy where the institutional process sur...

We conduct an empirical investigation into whether networking effects affect foreign direct investment (FDI) activity. Using bibliographical information on CEOs’ birth and education locations, we are able to identify changes from U.S. to foreign-connected CEOs that occurred in U.S. manufacturing firms of the S&P 500 from 1992 through 1997. Robust t...

There has been little analysis of the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on U.S. wage inequality, even though the presence of foreign-owned affiliates in the United States has arguably grown more rapidly in significance for the U.S. economy than trade flows. Using U.S. manufacturing data from 1977 to 1994, we find that inward FDI has...

Are foreign production and exports substitutes or complements? The continuing globalization of production makes the question of the relationship between trade and foreign direct investment ever more important. Standard theory of the multinational corporation (MNC) assumes substitution, while previous empirical work examining the relationship has ge...

We show that industrial ownership structures, such as keiretsu groupings in Japan, may significantly impact firms' incentives to engage in FDI. While the previous literature has mainly focused on the cost of capital advantages enjoyed by keiretsu firms, this paper examines two relatively unexplored channels by which ownership structure matters for...

Little evidence exists on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on local communities in the United States, despite evidence that U.S. communities actively bid against each other for FDI. We use detailed county-level panel data from South Carolina across 5-year intervals from 1980 through 1995 to investigate the effect of foreign manufactur...

Theory suggests R&D intensity and acquisition activity may be either directly or inversely related. However, we know relatively little about which firms are responsible for acquisition activity in high-technology industries, which are not only R&D-intensive, but also have substantial acquisition activity in the United States. Using a panel of 217 U...

This paper is a first attempt to examine the effect of retaliation threats on the likelihood of antidumping petitions. A model of reciprocal dumping with antidumping law in a repeated context predicts that firms will be less likely to file for antidumping protection as the expected profit loss from retaliation becomes high enough. We use a panel da...