NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions and HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development are happy to invite you to our joint meeting of the Research Seminar on Diversity and Development and HSE Seminar on Political Economy.

Laurent Weill (EM Strasbourg Business School) presents his paper "Are some dictators more attractive to foreign investors?" (joint paper with A. François and S. Panel).

Abstract:

Since political uncertainty is greater in dictatorship than in democracy, we test the hypothesis that foreign investors scrutinize public information on dictator to assess this risk. In particular, we assume they use five suitable dictators’ characteristics: age, political experience, education level, education in economics, and prior experience in business. We perform fixed effects estimations to explain FDI inflows on an unbalanced panel of 100 dictatorial countries from 1973 to 2008. We find that educated dictators are more attractive to foreign investors. We obtain strong evidence that greater educational attainment of the leader favors FDI. We also find evidence that education in economics of the leader enhances FDI. By contrast, age, political experience, and prior experience in business have no relationship with FDI. Our results are robust to several tests and checks, including the comparison with democracies.

Registration till noon of May 16.