Internationalization and firm performance: meta analysis and new empirical evidence

Abstract

There has been considerable research on the performance gains attributable to international trade and foreign direct investment in recent years. However, the empirical ndings are still unclear, in part because of di erent studies adopting di erent methodologies. The rst aim of this thesis is to contribute to the international economics and international business literature by conducting a meta-analysis of research that studies the causal relationship between exporting and rm productivity and of research that examines the relationship between multinationality and rm performance. In particular, the results indicate the impact of exporting upon productivity is higher in developing than developed countries, an important result from the point of views of the economic analysis of globalization and economic policy in general. Existing studies on multinationality and rm performance have not considered that multinational rms may di er with respect to their location choices of overseas investment. This is an important aspect given that there are substantial di erences across developed and developing countries locations. My research lls this gap by drawing on data covering a very large number of multinational rms from 46 countries. Speci cally, I examine whether heterogeneous investments abroad, in developed and developing countries, have signi cantly di erent e ects on rm performance. The results indicate that multinational rms with more FDI presences in developing countries have signi cantly higher performance than developed countries. China has been undergoing a period of high economic growth and this is likely 4 to be due, in part, to the massive levels of international trade. The third issue covered in my dissertation concerns whether there is any export premium and/or learning by exporting. I conduct my analysis using data for more than 3,000 Chinese rms over the period 2000-2005. Overall, I nd the existence of export premium, and once the rm has entered there is additional productivity growth in post-entry period.