FDI, gravity, and aggregation: revisiting the distance elasticity with sector-level FDI data
This paper re-examines foreign direct investment motives in the ‘FDI gravity’ model (Kleinert and Toubal, 2010), focusing on the role of distance. More precisely, we investigate whether aggregate and pooled gravity models for FDI obscure relevant heterogeneities across sectors. This is possible through the novel MREID dataset, which provides us with FDI data at the 2-digit NAICS level for 184 countries over the period 2010 to 2020.