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Official foreign direct investment (FDI) statistics track FDI via direct investing nation rather than ultimate investing country (UIC). If a FDI project is sourced through an overseas subsidiary, normal FDI metrics will register that investment as being from the third country, not the home country of the multinational. There is a growing awareness that the large amount of FDI channeled through special purpose vehicles and offshore financial centers therefore makes official statistics unreliable: investment from certain nations may be significantly under or over counted. According to official statistics, the United States ranks 11th in terms of total amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Vietnam. As Vietnam joins the ranks of lower middle-income countries, and becomes more integrated into global value chains, a more representative methodology for calculating FDI would help Vietnam thoughtfully engage with foreign investors and support Vietnam's development objectives. This report, commissioned by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in Hanoi includes: 1) A literature review of FDI databases and FDI tracking methods, 2) a comparative analysis of the existing methods for tracking FDI via UIC, 3) a discussion on the feasibility of implementing those methods for Vietnam, 4) a novel method for estimating Vietnam’s inward FDI via UIC, 6) recommendations to USAID for further research and analysis.

Reproducibility is key for building trust in research, yet it is not widespread in economics. We show how external certification can improve reproducibility in economics research. Such certification can be conducted by a trusted third party or agency, which formally tests whether a given result is indeed generated by the code and data used by a researcher. This additional validation step significantly enriches the peer-review process, without adding an extra burden on journals or unduly lengthening the publication process. We show that external certification can accommodate research based on confidential data. Lastly, we present an actual example of external certification.

This study examines whether and when credit rating agencies (CRAs) take negative rating actions against issuers committing accounting fraud before the fraud is publicly revealed and the economic impact of such rating actions. Our findings show that these fraud firms experience a greater number of negative rating actions during the four quarters prior to the public fraud revelation, including lower ratings, more rating downgrades, and more negative credit watch additions, compared to firms with similar economic fundamentals and stock performance. Our findings also show that such negative rating actions are not limited to fraud firms in financial distress, suggesting that our effect reflects CRA responses to accounting fraud per se. In addition, we find CRAs take more timely actions when frauds are more severe, when they involve accounts more often scrutinized by CRAs during their credit analysis, and when short sellers target firms. Last, we find that CRAs’ negative rating actions against fraud firms are informative to the market and are associated with shorter fraud duration. Overall, we conclude that CRAs possess private information about accounting fraud prior to the public revelation of this fraud and that they incorporate this information into negative ratings actions, accelerating fraud discovery.

This paper reviews several streams of research on market category formation. Most past research has largely focused on established category systems and the antecedents and consequences of categorical positioning (i.e., categorical purity vs. spanning; combination vs. replacement) but relatively ignored the formative processes leading to new categories. In this review, we address this lacuna to posit that scholarship would benefit from clearly disentangling category emergence from category creation. We analytically describe the differences between the two and elaborate the boundary conditions that guide and define which process is more likely to occur in a given market. Our review contributes to illuminating the role of organizational agency and strategic actions in market categories and their formation, which deserve greater attention as a result of their theoretical and practical implications.

Drawing on a framework of deinstitutionalization, this study explores the abandonment of budgeting through a multiple-case study of four companies. The findings illustrate how a number of antecedents to deinstitutionalization acted in each setting and show that abandonment was only achieved through skillful agency by dominant insiders to construct the need and manage for change. In addition, an interesting finding of the study is that two of the four companies reversed the deinstitutionalization and re-introduced traditional budgeting. This is explained by highlighting the role of remnants of formerly institutionalized practices and by demonstrating the importance of administrative and cultural controls which can support the abandonment of a central control practice in the first place. Overall, this research extends previous studies of deinstitutionalization by analyzing a taken-for-granted practice at the micro level and by giving a more agentic account of its processes.