The "tradability revolution" in services has led to a dramatic expansion of offshore outsourcing of services, allowing firms to take advantage of lower production costs in foreign countries. However, production costs alone cannot explain the location determinants of offshore outsourcing of services. In this paper, we argue that minimizing transaction costs is also an important determinant of the location of offshore outsourcing of services. We empirically analyze characteristics of services and characteristics of foreign countries that may impact on transaction costs in an outsourcing relationship and hence determine where services will be outsourced offshore. We derive measures of service characteristics -routineness, complexity and interactiveness -based on the tasks required to provide them. Further, we posit that there are interaction effects between service and country characteristics. Using Bureau of Economic Analysis data on US service outsourcing across 11 types of services to 31 countries between 1992 and 2005, we find that:(1) services that are more routine, less complex or less interactive are outsourced more to foreign countries; (2) services are outsourced more to countries with higher institutional quality and greater cultural proximity; (3) non-routine, complex and interactive services are outsourced relatively more to countries with a better institutional quality.
and Key Results• We examine the impact of NAFTA on FDI into the region and the individual member countries. The literature on FDI and regional economic integration suggests that the implementation of NAFTA makes the entire area a more desirable investment location. However, insofar as individual member countries are concerned, the a priori effects are not necessarily unambiguously positive. • We find that the implementation of NAFTA had a generally positive effect on inward FDI into the entire region, with the benefits accruing only to the United States and Canada.
We examine corporate governance diversity within a Coasian framework of stakeholder rights, where the central role of governance is to ensure that necessary firm-specific investments are made. This Coasian perspective on stakeholder theory offers a unifying framework towards a global theory of comparative corporate governance, bridging the gap between economic theories of the firm and stakeholder theory, also offering an economicsbased alternative to agency theory that explicitly accounts for stakeholder rights. The Coasian perspective encompasses a diversity of corporate governance systems, but does not imply a unique global corporate governance benchmark. We posit that governance is firm dependent and endogenous conditional on the constraints imposed by a national governance system; consequently, there should be no systematic relationship between governance and firm performance once the national constraints are controlled for. However, the same national corporate governance system constraints confer comparative advantages to firms whose efficient levels of firm-specific investments are favored.
0We develop hypotheses for the implications of regional economic integration on foreign direct investment (FDi) from insider and outsider countries contingent on member nations' countryspecific characteristics. 0 We find that following regional integration (1) on average there is an increase in inward FDI, and (2) structural determinants such as the host country's market size, cultural and geographic distances, and institutional efficiency have a significantly different impact than when the host nation was outside the integrated area. Common economic area membership is associated with greater FDI flows, with the larger members gaining more; furthermore, insider FDI is less sensitive to labor cost, whereas the host country's institutional efficiency is an even more positive determinant of insider FDI.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.