Investment In France Research Articles

Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Corporate Investment in France

Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Corporate Investment in France

Guanxi and supply chain collaboration: an analysis of the Sino-Franco buyer–supplier relationship

ABSTRACT Along with the rapid growth of Chinese investments in France in recent years, there’s an increasing interest in studying the impact of Sino-Franco buyer–supplier relationship on their supply chain collaboration (SCC). We refer to both operational research and social management research to consider how does guanxi influence SCC and buying companies’ supply chain performance. By analysing the survey data collected from Chinese buyers in France, our findings have not only empirically proved guanxi’s importance in Sino-Franco relationship, but also revealed guanxi’s indirect influence on supply chain performance through the mediating effect of three different SCC dimensions (i.e. version sharing, resource-based collaboration and process-based collaboration).

Sovereign Risk, Credit Shocks and R&D

We study how private R&D investment in France was affected by the tightening of credit conditions during the European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Using detailed R&D information on more than 25000 French companies, we show that financially constrained firms were relatively more likely to scale back their R&D activities following the sovereign debt crisis. We then focus on bank-firm linkages and exploit variation in the sovereign risk exposure of firms’ main bank during the sovereign debt crisis as an exogenous credit supply shock. Results indicate that firms related to banks with larger exposures to risky sovereign debt decreased R&D expenditure by more relative to other firms following the crisis. Our findings indicate that credit supply shocks have significant impact on firms’ R&D activities, and highlight an important transmission channel of sovereign risk to firm innovation and productivity.

Cost–Benefit Assessment of Public Investments in France: The Use of Counter-Experts

AbstractSocioeconomic evaluation of a public investment helps to understand its value for the community, and it also improves an investment by analyzing its different components, and the risks inherent in its completion. The Act of 31 December 2012 about Public Finance Planning makes it mandatory in France for project sponsors to conduct an ex-ante socioeconomic evaluation of all public civil investments made by the State and its public institutions. An independent counter-expert assessment of the ex-ante socioeconomic evaluation is conducted for the largest projects. A permanent committee of experts has been established to specify the methodological rules for socioeconomic evaluation and define the studies and research necessary.

Economic Policy Uncertainty in the Euro Area: An Unsupervised Machine Learning Approach

We model economic policy uncertainty (EPU) in the four largest euro area countries by applying machine learning techniques to news articles. The unsupervised machine learning algorithm used makes it possible to retrieve the individual components of overall EPU endogenously for a wide range of languages. The uncertainty indices computed from January 2000 to May 2019 capture episodes of regulatory change, trade tensions and financial stress. In an evaluation exercise, we use a structural vector autoregression model to study the relationship between different sources of uncertainty and investment in machinery and equipment as a proxy for business investment. We document strong heterogeneity and asymmetries in the relationship between investment and uncertainty across and within countries. For example, while investment in France, Italy and Spain reacts strongly to political uncertainty shocks, in Germany investment is more sensitive to trade uncertainty shocks. JEL Classification: C80, D80, E22, E66, G18, G31

Encouraging Investors to Enable Corporate Sustainability Transitions: The Case of Responsible Investment in France

This article studies the case of the socially responsible investment industry in France. This case accounts for how the socially responsible investment category and practices have successfully moved from the margins of the industry in the late 1990s to become mainstream over two decades. We bring to the forefront the importance of three complementary factors in the process of causing corporations to transition toward more sustainable businesses: the role of investors and, in particular, institutional investors; the importance of the presence of a clear category definition and of intermediary organizations, providing ratings, scores, and other calculative devices; and the role of governments and regulators. With other studies, this case stresses the fundamental influence of investors in how corporations manage sustainability transitions.

Measuring guanxi in Sino‐Franco buyer and supplier relationships

An understanding of guanxi—a network of relationships based on reputation, personal connections, and mutual support—is crucial in doing business with Chinese companies. Although the rapid growth of Chinese investment in France has created a need for a suitable Sino‐Franco guanxi measurement scale, the complexity of guanxi has hampered the development of a comprehensive and relevant instrument. Focusing on the Chinese perspective of the two most widely accepted dimensions of guanxi, emotional ties and reciprocity, this study develops and validates such a scale, and offers practical guidance for Western suppliers on how to handle social and workplace interactions, avoid conflict, and enhance the likelihood of success with their Chinese business partners.

Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in France: Motivations and Management Style

This research investigates the main motivations driving China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) in France and the management style that Chinese companies adopt toward their French subsidiaries. On the basis of interviews with managers of 17 Chinese subsidiaries in France, the authors identify sales in French and European markets as the main driver of Chinese FDI in France. Chinese FDI in France also aims at building bridges to African markets. The second FDI motive is asset seeking. For managing their subsidiaries in France, the Chinese companies adopt a polycentric management style. The Chinese parent companies rely on French managers, while Chinese expatriates adopt observational attitudes. This research confirms that the Chinese government is closely involved in Chinese outward FDI and supports both the “linkage, leverage, and learning” perspective and springboard theory.

Improving French Competitiveness through American Investment following World War II

Drawing on corporate materials from the Banque de France, this article reveals a fact that is rarely raised in the study of foreign investment in France: among American investment in France, there are many cases in which French companies took the initiative in seeking American investment. Not all French companies were hostile to U.S. enterprises, even during the upsurge of French anti-Americanism, and the French Fifth Republic's restrictive policies toward American investment were not as rigorous as they might have appeared. Their major objective was to increase French competitiveness.

Another Perspective on the Coca-Cola Affair in Postwar France

The Coca-Cola affair is a notable incident that is often cited in the history of American investments in France. However, the previous literature has generally not examined the social and economic contexts framing the incident, choosing instead to focus on the perspectives of the French communist attacks on Coca-Cola and the political pressure exerted by the French beverage industry to deny Coca-Cola’s application to operate in France. This article, by analyzing the affair based on a broader historical framework, attempts to offer another perspective on this famous incident. Drawing on French and American archival materials, it argues that the major causes of Coca-Cola’s defeat in France were primarily practical, financial considerations of the French government. The success of Pepsi Cola’s investment project in France provides confirmation of such considerations, and were closely related to France’s ultimate national objectives in the postwar years.

Overseas state outsiders as new sources of patient capital: Government policies to welcome Sovereign Wealth Fund investment in France and Germany

Strong debates in the varieties of capitalism literature as to whether financial liberalization and internationalization undermine ‘insider’ corporate governance systems based on patient capital in coordinated and state-led market economies have focused on ‘impatient’ overseas private capital. However, cross-border state investment has also grown. We examine government policies towards a prominent type of state investment—equity purchases by sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). We argue that policymakers in ‘insider’ corporate governance systems can see such investment as an attractive international source of patient capital to offset declines in traditional sources of patient capital. We compare Germany and France and show that policymakers actively welcome SWF investment. Policy is driven by coalitions of ‘insiders’ of the managements of large industrial firms and governments who seek passive patient capital and beneficial relationships with overseas investors. Thus, financial liberalization and internationalization can allow new sources of patient capital through overseas state investors.

Calculability as Politics in the Construction of Markets: The Case of Socially Responsible Investment in France

This article examines some of the processes by which power constitutes calculability and, in so doing, shapes the construction of markets. We combine insights from performativity studies about calculability with Lukes’ ‘radical view of power’ to investigate how multiple facets of power are mobilized to influence the creation and activities of calculative agencies in the process of market construction. An in-depth longitudinal study of the French socially responsible investment market shows how organizations acting as calculative agencies become sites of power through calculability. We identify how power is exercised over, through and against these calculative agencies by a variety of actors in order to build their position in the socially responsible investment market. Our results complement the broader question of the ‘government of economic life’ by showing how micro-level power games interact with the macro-politics of market building through calculative agencies. In so doing, our article sheds light on neglected aspects of the changing geopolitics of calculative power in market construction and suggests approaching ‘calculability as politics’ when studying the construction of markets.

Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History by Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing (review)

Reviewed by: Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History by Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing Bruce Epperson (bio) Bicycle Design: An Illustrated History. By Tony Hadland and Hans-Erhard Lessing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. Pp. 576. $34.95. This new book is the first accurate international history of the morphology of the bicycle to appear in English. It is not deeply analytical, nor does it try to be, except on a few select topics on which the authors are acknowledged experts. It is essentially a reference book. By admission, it does not include pre-1945 developments outside Europe or North America. But it does assemble a vast amount of information previously available only from small-press books, specialty journals, conference proceedings, and non-English-language sources, including those from Asia. It does so clearly and accurately, providing extensive citations and a complete bibliography, although many of the sources will tax even the most experienced and tenacious interlibrary loan specialist. Ostensibly, the book is organized by subject area, such as drive systems, suspensions, lighting, military bicycles, etc., but in actuality the first half is a chronological narrative of cycle development from simple, human-powered, wheeled devices such as the wheelbarrow, on past the draisine—a “walking machine” resembling a bicycle without cranks or pedals, to the [End Page 983] early front-wheel-powered velocipede. The second half does begin to break down its organization into discrete subsystems, frequently taking retrospective glances back to the era of the ordinary and the early safeties before following each development forward into the twenty-first century. Without intending to, the authors give weight to the theory that the bicycle is not an invention at all, but the discovery of an idea: that a two-wheel, single-track machine, given the proper geometry, can be made stable enough to remain upright while peddling, but sufficiently responsive to change directions when desired. The draisine, developed about 1817, has often been given short shrift. Karl von Drais was inspired by ice skaters, and in the hands of an experienced and athletic user on a smooth road, a good draisine was hardly a walking machine. A rider would have looked more like a trained rollerblader: gently swaying from side to side, strides ten to thirty feet apart, the tiller gently manipulated by the fingertips to compensate for each leg thrust as the forearms lay on a padded dashboard. It would have been obvious to any such user that the machine could easily balance while gliding. Ideas for a foot-powered front wheel were everywhere: grindstones, treadle-powered bow saws, even kids’ tricycles. Why did it take so long to put the two ideas together? It probably didn’t. The “invention” of the front-drive bicycle in 1866–67 was more likely the near-simultaneous dissemination in France and the United States of an idea that had been discovered and forgotten many times before, in many places. The crucial elements weren’t technical but, once again, social: an American patent system deliberately kept cheap and easy to use, and business laws that facilitated venture-capital-style investment in France. Probably the most fascinating part of this book is the specific point-by-point roster of deliberate forgeries, falsifications, perjuries, and hoaxes that have been perpetrated over the years. Rigid two-wheeled walking machines in France in 1791? Seventeenth-century cherubs on velocipedes in an English stained-glass church window? A Scottish treadle-and-rod rear-drive bicycle built by a Glasgow foundryman in 1842? All false, and intentionally so. Oh, and Leonardo’s sketch of a bicycle? A forgery, probably done between 1966 and 1969. In fact, the narrative history of the bicycle repeated most often in the United States was prepared by the attorneys for a large Boston bicycle firm engaged in a lawsuit in the mid-1880s to prove the validity of their patent (they lost). However, you won’t if you make this your basic deskbook for bicycle technology. It’s not deep, and it’s not colorful, but it’s broad, complete, well-written, accurate, and extensively lists additional sources of information. Its biggest defect is that it’s almost a century late. [End Page 984...

Wine: To drink or invest in? A study of wine as an investment asset in French portfolios

This paper aims to assess the role of wine investments in the diversification of French portfolios. Our 2007–2014 dataset is composed of not only Liv-ex indexes but also WineDex ones. These latter are proposed by iDealwine, an online platform for wine investment in France. We also include stocks, bonds and a risk-free asset to constitute different French portfolios based on the risk-aversion degree of investors (Canner et al., 1997). Moreover, we compare wine to another important alternative asset for French investors: gold. Following the mean-variance portfolio optimization approach (Markowitz, 1952), we find that portfolios with wine are more efficient than portfolios without it. However, following the mean-modified value-at-risk portfolio optimization (Favre and Galeano, 2002), the results with Liv-ex indexes are not maintained anymore. On the other hand, we use the Sharpe (1964) and modified Sharpe (Gregoriou and Gueyie, 2003) ratios to calculate the portfolio performance. We find that in most cases, the higher the proportion of wine, the higher the portfolio performance is. In all cases, our results suggest that iDealwine indexes, particularly WineDex Bordeaux, are more profitable than Liv-ex ones. On the other hand, following the optimal weights calculated by the Kroner and Ng (1998) method, we find that the less risk-averse the investors, the more they should include wine in their portfolios. Otherwise, we find that gold does not allow improving efficient frontiers. However, it allows improving the performance of French portfolios. A robustness check on the 2001–2006 period shows that wine and gold remain profitable for portfolio diversification even before the recent crisis period but with lower impacts on the performance improvement.

Does military expenditure crowd out private investment? A disaggregated perspective for the case of France

This article explores the effects of military expenditure on private investment in France, for the period between 1980 and 2010. Using a Keynesian model, our empirical results reveal that military spending crowds out private investment, a result commonly accepted in the literature. However, our approach is original in that we use disaggregated data. Such an approach distinguishes between the effects of non-equipment expenditure which crowds out investment and those of equipment expenditure which crowds in investment. As a result, we show that military equipment and private investment are complementary to one other.

Socially Responsible Investment in France

Socially responsible investment (SRI) in France is based on a “best in class” approach as opposed to the “exclusion” approaches used in other countries such as the United States or United Kingdom, where the rejection of sin stocks has been dominant historically. The objective of this research note is to examine whether the French SRI market, by focusing more on financial rather than on ethical considerations, compared with other countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or even Sweden, may lead to a form of “mainstreaming” of SRI processes. The authors explore several convergent mechanisms. First, the authors analyze the importance of the mainstreaming issue in the history of SRI as well as in the contemporaneous debate in the academic literature on the links between financial and extrafinancial (SRI) performance. Second, the authors review the role played by ethical finance laws adopted in France in the early 2000s in the development of the SRI market. Finally, the authors discuss the results of a survey of French SRI analysts working both for large institutional investors and asset managers in France in 2009.

Comparative political economy of regional transport infrastructure investment in Europe

We study the role of political institutions in the regional allocation of public infrastructure investments in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We estimate the regional variation in the allocation for each country, controlling for the potential endogeneity of its impact on growth and distribution. We compare the importance of political institutions, federalism and the electoral system, with the normative criteria, efficiency, redistribution and equality. We find that on the macro-level there is some evidence that different national institutions do indeed shape political competition, but that partisan politics and, in particular, normative principles are overall more influential across all types of political systems.

Economic Rationale Behind the Policy Regarding Foreign Investment in France

France has the world's fifth largest economy by nominal figures and the ninth largest economy by PPP figures. It has the second largest economy in Europe (behind its main economic partner Germany) in nominal figures, based on the dynamic industrial structure of the French economy. When choosing where to invest internationally there are a couple of important considerations that should be taken into account. Understanding International Investment France your international investment options is the first step to making wise investment choices and the process is best undertaken with expert advice. Considering the importance of foreign investment and the subsequent benefits it brings. The French government has also established various agencies that work to attract more foreign investment in the country. In order to improve the competitiveness of French companies, the French government has decided to invest massively in a “National Pact for Growth, Competitiveness and Employment”. The Report highlights the confidence in the French economy shown by North American investors, who were the source of 26 % of investment decisions in 2012 and the growing share of projects from the emerging markets (8%). Over 800 offices under foreign control were active in the competitiveness clusters and over 2,000 foreign companies opened an office in France, taking advantage of the Research and Development Tax Credit.

Mistaking an Emerging Market for a Social Movement? A Comment on Arjaliès’ Social-Movement Perspective on Socially Responsible Investment in France

In a recent contribution to this journal, Arjalies (J Bus Ethics 92:57–78, 2010) suggests that the emergence of socially responsible investment (SRI) in France can be best described as a social movement with a collective identity that aimed to challenge the dominant logic of the financial market. Such an account is at odds with a body of empirical studies that approaches SRI in the French context as a process of market creation led by loosely coordinated actors with contradictory and conflicting interests and values, who have mainly complied with—rather than opposed—the existing dominant financial logic of the asset-management field. In this comment, we build on this prior research to contest Arjalies’ perspective on both theoretical and empirical grounds, with the aim of highlighting the shortcomings of conflating social movements and other forms of collective actions in understanding the building of new markets in organization theory and SRI studies. We contend that in mistaking for social movement forms of collective actions that underpin the emergence of markets, scholars of organization theory may confuse distinct mechanisms in their explanation of SRI emergence across countries, overlook the complex dynamics and interactions of markets and social movements, and, most importantly, fail to evaluate the real political significance of SRI as an empirical phenomenon. We propose that future research on SRI distinguishes carefully “social-movement research as a theoretical framework” from “social movement as an empirical phenomenon” in order to avoid such drawbacks while benefiting from recent advances in social-movement research.

Investment in France Since the Beginning of the Eighties (In French)

Since the early 1990's, the total investment in the business sector seems to be lower than the level predicted by the dynamics prevailing in the 1980's. The usual explanatory variables of investment (demand, profit, degree of utilization capacity) are not sufficient to explain its evolution in the recent years. However investment has a quite different dynamics according to the type of goods that is considered. In the 1990's, the behavior of the equipment investment is in accordance with the dynamics of the 1980's, mainly explained by activity and profit. But, whereas building investment seems to be complementary to the equipment until 1990, both investments move afterwards in a different way. The unexpected behavior of the overall investment in the recent years originates in the building investment.