We develop a model of foreign operations to determine a parent firm’s choice between wholly owned subsidiaries and joint ventures (and the degree of equity participation in the latter case). We introduce capital market imperfections into the model to capture a positive effect of the firm’s net worth on investment; this effect plays an important role in determining organization forms because the...

Governments often promote inward foreign investment to encourage technology “spillovers” from foreign to domestic firms. Using panel data on Venezuelan plants, we find that foreign equity participation is positively correlated with plant productivity (the “own-plant” effect), but this relationship is only robust for small enterprises. We then test for spillovers from joint ventures to plants wi...