Effect of foreign acquisitions on target firm productivity

One of the global trends of recent years has been the creation of direct channels of information, knowledge and goods between different units located around the world. The entities responsible for establishing such flows have a principal representative, which is called the Multinational Company (MNC); it is a characteristic entity of the current globalization context and market integration. The MNC's motivated by different reasons - they are economic in the case they seek to reduce their costs or performance if they try to improve their production chain - they make investments in other local companies located in countries abroad, a phenomenon that is currently known as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Under the assumption that the objective for which an MNC invests abroad is met, how is it possible to identify the effect on companies that remained in a local state and are now transformed into multinationals due to the investment received from abroad? The main objective of this study is to establish the effect on the target companies in the post-phase of an FDI by a multinational company, through the comparison of economic and productivity index. To meet the objective, companies classified in the manufacturing sector that received in FDI during the period from 2009 to 2014 were studied, where the investment allowed the investor to maintain an amount of 50 percent or more of the value of the stock. The performance evaluation in the post-investment phase was carried out through the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) model, which allows establishing a method to evaluate an intervention in the study units, in this case, the effect of the FDI on Italian national companies. The result was established through the means comparison of the indexes chosen for the evaluation in the three years after the investment, enough time in which the results of a new administration can be identifiable. The comparison was made between a control group and the companies treated; the companies belonging to the control group are characterized by remaining in a local state, that is, they did not receive FDI, and for having a similar performance during the year in which the treated companies received the investment. All the information used in the document was extracted from the Zephyr and AIDA databases, which contain information about all investment and investment intentions in the world, as well as information on the account statements of companies located in Italy. The calculations made within the document were produced by Stata, which consists of a statistical software package, where most of its users work in research.