贸易壁垒对外国直接投资的影响：来自中国太阳能电池板的证据

摘要

Trade barriers can affect firms’ international investment decisions, not only the trade flows they directly target. This paper studies the anti-dumping and countervailing duties (AD-CVDs) imposed by the United States in 2012 on Chinese solar panel imports and examines how affected Chinese firms adjusted their foreign direct investment decisions. Due to their differential exposure to U.S. trade policy, Chinese firms are granted different AD-CVD rates. I leverage this variation to develop a difference-in-differences design. Using monthly greenfield FDI announcement data from 2009 to 2018 and a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator, I find that targeted firms increased FDI by 145 million dollars in 2012, relative to a pre-policy average of 9 million dollars. The effects are larger and more persistent among firms already active in FDI before the policy. The greenfield FDI response does not carry over to cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Location choice analysis suggests that targeted firms shifted investment toward Asia, especially after a second round of AD-CVD measures in 2015. Descriptive trade and investment data provide suggestive evidence consistent with production relocation and export-platform FDI. These results document FDI diversion that modifies investment patterns in the short run and is consistent with trade-barrier avoidance in the medium run.