Trust, Investment, and Business Contracting
研究了外国高科技公司在中国投资时，如何通过考虑当地可信度来降低知识产权被侵占的风险，并发现企业更倾向于在信任度高的地区投资、建立合资企业并增加研发投入。
Abstract How does trust affect business contracting at the firm level? We analyze the case of foreign high-tech companies investing in China, where the risk of expropriation of their intellectual property is high. We find that firms mitigate this type of risk by taking local trustworthiness into account when making investment decisions. Firms prefer to invest in regions where local partners and employees are considered more trustworthy; they are also more likely to establish joint ventures and to make greater research and development investments. We employ instrumental variable regressions and dynamic panel generalized method of moments estimators to alleviate endogeneity concerns and control for time-invariant heterogeneity.