FDI, ownership structure, and productivity

Abstract

The standard firm heterogeneity model of FDI considers the case of whole ownership of foreign affiliates. However, there exist many partially-owned foreign affiliates. This paper builds a model based on Helpman et al. (2004) to allow various ownership structures and posits some testable hypotheses on the relationship between productivity and ownership shares/structures. The empirical part corroborates these hypotheses, showing that high productivity firms tend to have a higher ownership share in their affiliates, and lower productivity firms tend to opt for joint-ventures with wholesalers and/or local/3rd country partners.