Firm's Intangible Assets and Multinational Activity: Joint-Venture Versus FDI

Valeria Gattai

No 12081, Knowledge, Technology, Human Capital Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)

Abstract: This paper provides a theoretical formalisation of the joint-venture contract, as an alternative to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), within a Dissipation of Intangible Assets framework. In a two-period, two-country equilibrium model, we discuss how the threat of knowledge spillover shapes the boundaries of a Multinational Enterprise. Similarly to the theoretical findings on the FDI-licensing trade off, we show that Foreign Direct Investment is more likely to emerge when know-how easily spills over - i.e. when firms are endowed with more intangible assets or they belong to high tech industries. Probit estimates, from an entirely new firm-level dataset, constructed by the author, show that the experience of Italian multinationals in Asia is in line with our theoretical predictions.

Keywords: International; Relations/Trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53
Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/12081/files/wp050122.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:feemkt:12081

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.12081

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Knowledge, Technology, Human Capital Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().