Is There A Path Dependence For Chinese Enterprises' OFDI Location Selection?

In today's global economic structure,different countries have great differences in location conditions.The choice of host countries will affect the overall international layout of enterprises,thus affect the costs and benefits of OFDI.Throughout the literature at home and abroad,most of the research study the factors affecting the location selection of OFDI separately,and explore whether some certain factors affect the location selection of the enterprise OFDI.Meanwhile,most studies are based on static analysis method,each investment of the enterprise is regarded as independent.However,considering the environment of a certain aspect of the invested country alone does not explain the reasons for the location choice of the enterprise.The static and independent research methods can not explain the intertemporal correlation presented in the sequential investment of the enterprise.Based on the previous studies,this paper expands from two aspects:first,the multiple dimension characteristics of the host country that influence the location selection are constructed into a comprehensive index to represent the feature of the country,in order to consider multi-dimensional comprehensive consideration of the company's investment decisions.Second,referring to the method of Nachum and Song(2011),the decision-making sequence of Chinese listed company OFDI is regarded as a dynamic and interdependent investment portfolio,in order to study the influence of the similarity of international investment trajectory on location selection.This paper constitutes a collection of all the invested host countries,called the enterprise's investment portfolio,and explores the impact of the company's existing portfolio on the location choice of subsequent projects.Taking the listed companies in China with foreign direct investment in 2002-2017 as the research object,this paper has obtained 866 OFDI projects of 376 Chinese listed companies in 73 countries(regions)through a series of screening adjustments.In order to explore the subsequent influence of the enterprise's OFDI investment trajectory,this paper constructs a variable to measure the similarity of investment paths of multinational enterprises.From the micro level of the enterprise,it studies whether the investment trajectory dependents on the previous location selection,and then introduces two adjustment variables:the depth and breadth of the company's own international experience,to explore whether it will affect the dependence of the company's investment trajectory.By constructing the Logit regression model,the paper draws the following main conclusions:when the comprehensive characteristics of a country(region)and the comprehensive characteristics of the existing portfolio of the enterprise are more similar,enterprise are more likely to invest in the country;And when the breath of multinational corp orations' international experience is greater,the positive correlation between the similarity of corporate investment trajectories and the likelihood of entry will be weakened;When the depth of multinational corporations',international experience is greater,the positive correlation between the similarity of the company's investment trajectory and the likelihood of entry will be weakened.The robustness test also effectively supports the results.In addition,this paper expands the research on the heterogeneity of enterprises and initial investment countries.Finally,based on the results of this paper,I propose some suggestions for the construction of the international investment risk system and the government's improvement of the international investment environment.According to the shortcomings of this paper,we also think about the future research direction.