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The London office market is a major destination of international real estate capital and arguably the epicentre of international real estate investment over the past decade. However, the increase in global uncertainties in recent years due to socio-economic and political trends highlights the need for more insights into the behaviour of international real estate capital flows. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the influence of the global and domestic environment on international real estate investment activities within the London office market over the period 2007–2017.

This study adopts an auto-regressive distributed lag approach using the real capital analytics (RCA) international real estate investment data. The RCA data analyses quarterly cross-border investment transactions within the central London office market for the period 2007–2017.

The study provides insights on the critical differences in the influence of the domestic and global environment on cross-border investment activities in this office market, specifically highlighting the significance of the influence of the global environment in the long run. In the short run, the influence of factors reflective of both the domestic and international environment are important indicating that international capital flows into the London office market is contextualised by the interaction of different factors.

The authors provide a holistic study of the influence of both the domestic and international environment on cross-border investment activities in the London office market, providing more insights on the behaviour of global real estate capital flows.

The purpose of this study is to introduce a new perspective on determinants of cross-border investments in commercial real estate, namely, the relative attractiveness of a target market. So far, the literature has analyzed only absolute measures of investment attractiveness as determinants of cross-border investment flows.

The empirical study uses a classic ordinary least squares estimation for a European panel data set containing 28 cities in 18 countries, with quarterly observations from Q1/2008 to Q3/2018. After controlling for empirically proven explanatory covariates, the model is extended by the new relative measurement based on relative yields/cap rates and relative risk premia. Additionally, the study applies a generalized additive mixed model (GAMM) to investigate a potentially nonlinear relationship.

The study finds on average a ceteris paribus, statistically significant lagged influence of the proxy for relative attractiveness. Nonetheless, a differentiation is needed; relative risk premia are statistically significant, whereas relative yields are not. Moreover, the GAMM confirms a nonlinear relationship for relative risk premia and cross-border transaction volumes.

The results are of interest for both academia and market participants as a means of explaining cross-border capital flows. The existing knowledge on determinants is expanded by relative market attractiveness, as well as an awareness of nonlinear relationships. Both insights help to comprehend the underlying transaction dynamics in commercial real estate markets.

Whereas the existing body of literature focuses on absolute attractiveness to explain cross-border transaction activity, this study introduces relative attractiveness as an explanatory variable.

This paper aims to analyze outbound investments from China at the time of economic crisis caused due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and how target valuation and the host country’s inbound investment policies influence the acquisition intents. As firms witness low valuations during an economic downturn, they become attractive targets for opportunistic buyers, who may be driven by motives beyond business and influenced by the home country’s political agenda. Such attempts are countered with the adoption of restrictive investment policies in host countries.

The study uses secondary data on cross-border acquisitions from China over the past year and compares the characteristics of these acquisitions with cross-border acquisitions of acquirers from other large developed and developing economies.

Statistical analyzes show that there are significant differences in the way acquirers from China pursue strategic asset seeking, creeping and control seeking acquisitions during the pandemic and the pre-pandemic period. This paper also observes that reduced valuation of the target, due to economic downturn or otherwise, result in greater propensity in strategic asset seeking acquisitions by Chinese acquirers. At the same time, adverse policies at host nations negatively influence the strategic asset seeking propensity of these acquirers. In addition, the premium in the valuation of target assets during the pandemic does not drop significantly when compared with that of the pre-pandemic period.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 and its concomitant economic impact across the globe, the study brings forwards insights on predatory foreign direct investment (FDI) and explores how policy responses in host countries can be comprehensive rather than disembedded and unilateral.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of corruption on foreign direct investment (FDI) and its two major modes of entry: greenfield investment (greenfield) and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As).

Data are collected from 131 countries. Modern econometric techniques, including the generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator, two-stage least square estimator and two-step system GMM estimator, are used to evaluate the impact of corruption on FDI activities.

The empirical results illustrate that corruption is a deterioration factor that significantly hinders FDI inflows. However, this finding turns out to be contradictory when the two major components of FDI – greenfield investment and cross-border M&As – are separately examined. Specifically, while corruption consistently discourages cross-border M&As over time, it appears to exert positive effect on greenfield investments.

This is among the first to empirically examine the impact of corruption on FDI and its modes of entry in a number of countries spanning different time windows. In this sense, this paper also captures the changing nature of societies and economic conditions overtime and, therefore, enable academic researchers, policy-makers and business practitioners to draw broad inferences from the empirical results.

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions are now the fundamental mechanisms of globalization and considered as prime vehicles for business engagement across the countries through the foreign direct investment route. Significant amounts of foreign funds are crossing the country borders for acquisitions with the objectives of earning super normal returns. But realizing super normal returns from foreign acquisitions are far more difficult than that of foreign greenfield projects or domestic M&As or greenfield projects. The super normal profit itself is “synergy” which is the main driving force for any M&A including the cross-border one. Even though foreign policies of individual countries affect cross-border M&A decisions, corporate and market-driven financial numbers significantly influence the synergy estimation. Synergy should bring in all round greater efficiency and value addition to all stakeholders. But if the cross-border deal is not financially crafted properly, it may fall flat causing more distress to the acquirer compared to domestic acquisition. The theory of synergy is well developed which mostly applies to the domestic M&As. But due to inherent differences between cross-border and domestic M&As, the same synergy theory may not apply equally to the cross-border ones. Therefore, a different connotation of synergy is propounded in this work for cross-border M&As, which can be a corollary to the conventional theory of synergy. This alternative theory of synergy aims at helping the companies in developing their own financial strategies before making their strategic decisions for cross-border M&A deals.

By examining the link between the two types of FDI and intrastate conflict from 1990 to 2015 in 138 countries, this paper intends to test the peace-through-FDI thesis.

To empirically test the hypotheses, this study examines county-year observations from 1990 to 2015 for 138 countries. An instrumental variable method is utilized to this end.

This paper shows that, while greenfield FDI generates pacifying effects on intrastate conflict, M&A investment is likely to promote the onset of intrastate conflict.

Despite the extensive literature on FDI and the onset of intrastate conflict, many have approached FDI as a singular phenomenon, and have not broken it down into its constituent parts of greenfield and brownfield investment types. Theorizing that this practice had oversimplified and blurred the relationship of FDI on intrastate conflict onset, the authors pursued the collection of novel data in order to more completely distinguish between the two types of FDI. With this novel approach dividing FDI into its component parts, the authors break open the black box of FDI to empirically find out the extent of its diverse influence on the onset of intrastate conflict.

This study aims to test the impact of different institutional quality indicators on two modes of foreign direct investment (FDI)-greenfield investment and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) for a sample of 110 countries over the period 2003–2017.

The authors develop a model of well-known FDI determinants, such as market size and potential, openness, the value of the national currency and the quality of institutions. The authors examine one-by-one five different institutional factors: law and order, investment profile of the host country, control of corruption (anti-corruption); democratic accountability, and government stability, applying a generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator that assures no endogeneity and reverse causality of the key explanatory variables.

The results point out the fact that fertile institutional conditions for attracting greenfield FDI to developing countries require law and order, good investment conditions and a state of democracy, but not necessarily tight control of corruption and a stable government. On the other hand, the appropriate institutional environment for attracting cross-border M&A sales flows to developing countries includes strong law and order, good investment conditions, strict control of corruption and strong democratic accountability. The results for developed countries show overall smaller importance of institutions as a determinant of both types of FDI.

This is the first study to analyze the differentiated determinants of the two modes of investment. The study holds implications for crafting two different policies for attracting greenfield FDI and M&A sales.

Emerging economy firms seek strategic assets through cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) to upgrade their capabilities. The paper explores the relation between emerging economy firms' investments in CBAs and subsequent investments in domestic R&D. It investigates the underlying mechanism that links a firm's decision to pursue CBAs and the outcomes from the CBAs. The main idea behind the study is that firms have higher possibility of creating value from cross-border acquisitions when they simultaneously invest in domestic R&D though both investments are constrained by financial and managerial resources.

The hypotheses are tested on a panel data set of 296 Indian firms over a period of 13 years (2003–2015). The authors use a two-stage Heckman procedure for testing their hypotheses. In the first stage, a probit model predicts the probability of a firm being a cross-border acquirer. The second stage model is estimated by a pooled-data GLS (generalized least squares) regression technique.

The authors find a nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship between firm's investments in CBAs and domestic R&D. This suggests a complementary relation between investments in CBAs and a firm's domestic R&D at lower levels of investments in CBAs. At higher levels of investments in CBAs, CBA investments begin to substitute for firm's domestic R&D investments. For firms with higher international product-market experience and those operating in the hi-tech industry, the relationship between investments in CBAs and domestic R&D is complementary even at higher levels of CBA investments.

The study highlights the role of an emerging market firm's investment in domestic R&D as a link between the decision to invest in CBAs and related outcomes thereof. Emerging market firms face resource constraints while pursuing simultaneous investments in CBAs and R&D, but investment in R&D is essential for realizing the acquisition objectives. The authors also establish the significance of industry context and experiential learning in deciding the allocation of resources between CBAs and internal R&D.

Cross-border M & A is one of the most important ways of international capital flows, and scholars have paid a lot of attention to this area, but a general explaining model has still not been generated. The purpose of this paper, based on Lambrecht (2004) and Bolton et al. (2013), is to build a general explaining model in this area and use the new model to explain some real world issues.

The model work in this paper is based on Lambrecht’s (2004) real option model, which is the classical modeling method in this area, and take the economic crisis method of Bolton et al. (2013) into consideration; the authors also use the relative market condition to illustrate the motivation and market timing of cross-border M & A in this paper to connected the bidders’ markets and targets’ markets together to build the general explaining model for cross-border M & A.

By analyzing the new model the authors build in this paper, the authors get three conclusions. Conclusion 1: when the bidders’ technologies are more advanced than the targets’, the bidders prefer market-seeking cross-border M & A, and the relatively higher the bidders’ technologies are, the stronger the preference is; when the bidders’ technologies are less advanced than the targets’, the bidders prefer technology-seeking cross-border M & A, and there exists an optimal relative technology ratio at which the bidders have the strongest motivation to exercise the technology-seeking type cross-border M & A. Conclusion 2: host country’s high economic growth helps attracting market-seeking cross-border M & A, conversely host country’s low economic growth helps attracting technology-seeking cross-border M & A. Conclusion 3: the bidders prefer to exercise the technology-seeking cross-border M & A when the home markets are stable or when economic crises happen in targets markets; and the bidders prefer not to exercise the market-seeking cross-border M & A when economic crises happen in home markets; and the relationship between the motivation for bidders to exercise market-seeking cross-border M & A and the possibility of the happening of economic crisis in home countries presents an inverse N-shape curve.

In this paper the authors first use the relative market condition to illustrate the motivation and market timing in the cross-border M & A research area and build a general model based on current literatures.

This study investigates the impact of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI), specifically focusing on two components of FDI: greenfield investment and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The objective is to analyze how EPU influences these two types of FDI differently. It further investigates how this impact varies during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Data were collected from various sources such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Policy uncertainty index and the World Bank database to create a sample covering 213 countries from 2003 to 2020. The research objective was accomplished by utilizing the panel ordinary least squares (OLS) with fixed effects estimator.

The results demonstrate that countries that experience more EPU observe a decrease in FDI inflows. The authors also observe that FDI inflows have reduced due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the findings show that the impact of EPU is different between two components of FDI during the Covid-19 period. Specifically, the authors find that when uncertainty is trigged by the health crisis, there is an increase in FDI inflows in the form of cross-border M&As only. One possible reason is that cross-border M&As investors may take advantage of institutional quality (such as corruption) as an “efficient grease” to quickly expedite the entry process, which ultimately leads to a rise in cross-border M&As investment.

Overall, the study attempts to demonstrate empirical evidence about how EPU affects FDI inflows with an up-to-date dataset. In addition, the authors illustrate the significance of breaking down total FDI inflows into two sub-categories when examining the relationship between EPU and FDI. Third, the authors prove that the influence of EPU on FDI inflows differ significantly among different types of FDI components.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2023-0114