A Novel measure of Political Risk and Foreign Direct Investment Inflows

This paper proposes a novel measure of political risk that is used to confirm some of the findings documented in the Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) literature. Particularly, we confirm the positive relationship between political stability and its components on net FDI inflows, and the mitigating effect of natural resource exports on this relationship. The proposed political risk measure contains relevant, unique and incremental information not observed in the literature. For example, although this measure is highly correlated with the political risk rating of the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), it contains unique information that explains net FDI flows beyond what is explained by the political risk rating of ICRG