1、Introduction
To what extent does technological knowledge flow across national borders, and by what means are these knowledge flows mediated? These questions have received an increasing amount of attention over the last decade, as leading scholars in international economics have focused considerable research effort on the topic of knowledge spillovers.1 A considerable body of theoretical and empirical work has focused on the extent to which imports of manufactured goods could serve as channels of knowledge spillovers.2 While less thoroughly explored in formal models, the literature also suggests the possibility of a “learning-by-exporting” effect in which firms learn to improve the quality of their products and production processes through contact with more advanced foreign competitors in global export markets.3
The flow of goods is not the only means through which technological knowledge can flow across national boundaries. An obvious alternative is foreign direct investment. A number of countries have policies that encourage or even subsidize multinational investment. Often, as has been the case in Singapore and Malaysia, these policies are deliberately biased in favor of multinational firms in “technology intensive” industries. Such preferences are based on the view that production and/or research activities undertaken by multinational affiliates within national borders confer “spillover” benefits. In an effort to submit these views to careful statistical tests, a number of scholars have undertaken empirical studies of spillover benefits from FDI. The work of Harrison and her co-authors, which has been particularly influential, has used micro-level panel data drawn from Morocco and Venezuela.4 Following the basic methodology developed by Aitken and Harrison (1999), Keller and Yeaple (2003) and Haskel et al. (2002) have examined FDI in advanced industrial economies, and Javorcik (2004) has examined FDI in Lithuania.
In the previous work, I have examined issues related to the focus of this paper. Branstetter and Nakamura (2003) examined changes in the research productivity of Japanese manufacturing firms over the 1980s and 1990s. As part of that study, we examined the extent to which R&D alliances and partnerships with U.S. firms facilitated the flow of knowledge spillovers across international boundaries. That paper did not examine the role of FDI as a channel of knowledge spillovers. Branstetter (2000b) examined the role of FDI as a channel of knowledge spillovers from the U.S. to Japan, but was able to do so only indirectly, by quantifying the comovement between the R&D spending of U.S. firms and the patent output of Japanese corporations. As noted in that paper, these correlations are subject to confounding influences, raising doubts about the accuracy of such indirect inference.
This paper examines the role FDI plays in mediating knowledge spillovers, but it takes a completely different methodological approach. First, in contrast to many of the aforementioned papers, I measure the impact of FDI not only on knowledge spillovers from the investing Japanese firms to “indigenous” American firms but also the impact of Japanese investment on knowledge spillovers from American firms to the investing Japanese firms.5 Second, I allow the impact of FDI on knowledge spillovers to depend upon the nature of the subsidiary — and I find differences in the spillover-enhancing impact of different types of subsidiaries that are consistent with recent theoretical work on multinational firms. Third, I do not follow the earlier convention of using measured changes in TFP or other revenue-based measures to infer the presence or absence of knowledge spillovers.
As is well known, conventional measures of productivity can reflect market power as well as technical efficiency.6 When technologically more advanced foreign affiliates first enter a market, their presence may erode the market power of indigenous incumbents while – at the same time – introducing new production techniques and technologies from which these same incumbents learn. Real knowledge spillovers can take place, yet their effects can be masked in the data by changes in appropriability conditions. Alternatively, robust demand growth in a sector of the host country could lead to higher profits, which generates higher measured TFP growth for domestic firms while, at the same time, inducing investment by foreign firms.
This paper presents an alternative empirical framework for measuring the impact of foreign direct investment on knowledge spillovers using patent citations data. I then use this framework to measure the impact of foreign direct investment in the United States by a group of Japanese manufacturing firms on knowledge flows from American firms to these investing Japanese firms and from the investing Japanese firms to American inventors. To preview my empirical results, I find evidence that foreign direct investment enhances knowledge flows in both directions. I also find that the direction and degree of spillover flow is related to the characteristics of Japanese firms' U.S. subsidiaries in plausible ways. Knowledge spillovers received by the investing Japanese firms tend to be strongest via R&D and product development facilities. On the other hand, spillovers from the investing Japanese firms to indigenous American inventors appear to flow most strongly through Japanese firms' greenfield affiliates.
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