Bilateral Foreign Direct Investment in OECD-Countries. Exploring the Link between FDI and Human Capital via the Gravity Equation

Master's Thesis from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - Environmental Policy, , language: English, abstract: The thesis at hand examines whether human capital endowment has significant explanatory power on foreign direct investments in OECD countries between 1985 and 2017. The author has applied quantitative as well as qualitative human capital variables in the spirit of the bilateral gravity approach, while applying a version of the gravity model which accounted for country- and year-fixed-effects. The persistence of the results has been analysed via subsamples of the periods 1985 to 2000 and 2001 to 2017. Additionally, both, FDI stock and flow data have been used to test whether the empirical findings are robust regarding the respective data choice.

In the past decades research produced plenty of papers, monographies and books regarding the analyses of the determinants of international financial capital flows (FDI). This strand of scientific literature is closely related to the activities of multinational companies/enterprises (MNCs/MNEs).