Foreign Direct Investment, Information Spillover, and Export Decision : The Concentric-Circle Model with Application to Hungarian Firm-Level Data

In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the export decision of domestic firms using large-scale panel data from Hungary. In comparison with the conventional model that expresses the export propensity of multinational enterprises (MNEs) with a single variable, the concentric-circle model, considering the nested structure of industrial classification, more precisely specifies the source, extent, and direction of information spillovers from MNEs to indigenous firms. We also confirmed the close relationship between the information spillover effect and the heterogeneity of FDI and domestic firms.