KCG Researcher Gave a Presentation at the Mainz FDI Workshop

© Frauke Steglich

KCG PhD Researcher Frauke Steglich joined the fourth Mainz Workshop on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Multinational Corporations on November 15-16 in Mainz, Germany. The workshop aimed at better understanding the role of FDI and multinationals in the world economy and its interactions with politics and institutions from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Prof. Dr. Carolina Villegas-Sanchez from the ESADE Business School Barcelona gave the keynote speech of the workshop “Foreign Investment and Domestic Productivity: Identifying Knowledge Spillovers and Competition Effects”. The workshop gathered junior and senior academics who specialize in related research fields to share their most current research findings and insights.

Steglich presented an ongoing research project “FDI and Institutional Development in Sub-Saharan Africa – An Empirical Analysis at the Local Level”, in cooperation with Dr. Julian Donaubauer (Helmut Schmidt University), Peter Kannen (Helmut Schmidt University), and Dr. Adnan Seric (KCG External Research Fellow and United Nations Industrial Development Organization). This project aims at learning more about possible effects of FDI on a country’s local institutional quality. Using geo-referenced firm and household survey data they analyze whether the presence of foreign investors is associated with changes in local institutional quality (proxied by individuals’ corruption experience) around foreign-owned production facilities in Sub-Saharan African countries. Applying an estimation strategy that uses spatial and temporal variation in the data, they find that the presence of foreign firms increases bribery among people living nearby, i.e., it worsens the local institutional quality.