The Determinants of Foreign Direct Investments: Sensitivity Analyses of Cross‐Country Regressions
使用极端边界分析检验现有研究中外国直接投资决定因素的稳健性，发现市场规模（人均GDP）与FDI的相关性稳健，而税收、工资、开放度等变量高度敏感。
A vast empirical literature has used ad hoc linear cross‐country regressions to search for the determinants of FDI. The literature is extensive and controversial. Can policy‐makers use this body of research to learn anything that can help them stimulate FDI? The author uses Extreme Bound Analysis (EBA) to examine if any of the conclusions from the existing studies is robust to small changes in the conditioning information set. The EBA upholds the robustness of the correlation between FDI and market‐size, as measured by per‐capita GDP, but indicates that the relation between FDI and many of the controversial variables (namely, tax, wage, openness, exchange rate, tariff, growth, and trade balance)bare highly sensitive to small alterations in the conditioning information set. The author also studies the distribution of the estimated coefficients of the controversial explanatory variables to rank them in order of their likelihood of their being correlated with FDI.