The Role of Multinational Production in a Risky Environment

Veronica Rappoport and Natalia Ramondo

No 1106, 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: The crucial difference between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and other international financial flows is that the former involves technology flows across countries. In the presence of country-specific shocks, these flows not only alter the distribution of output across countries, but also across different states of nature. This paper introduces FDI simultaneously as a portfolio and technology flow in a risky environment. We find that multinational activities improve the scope for international risk diversification even in world with complete international financial markets. Multinational firms have incentives to locate affiliates in countries with business cycles least correlated with world risk. In doing so, they reshape the patterns of world risk and improve the scope for international risk diversification. A calibration exercise for OECD countries suggests that multinational activities reduces the consumption risk premium by 5% beyond the diversification opportunities provided by complete financial markets.

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2009/paper_1106.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The role of multinational production in a risky environment (2010)
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:red:sed009:1106

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2009 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().