Researchers have long identified both FDI and entrepreneurship as potentially important determinants of economic development. Accordingly, a literature has grown to investigate whether FDI stimulates entrepreneurial activity in host countries. It is difficult to synthesize these empirical findings because many of the studies use different definitions of FDI and entrepreneurship, study different time periods and countries, and apply different estimation procedures to generate their results. In order to better understand this literature, we collect 675 estimates from 47 studies that estimate the relationship between FDI and entrepreneurial activity using country-level data. We use meta-analysis to address two questions: (1) What is the overall, mean effect of FDI on entrepreneurship?, and (2) What factors account for differences in estimated effects across studies? An innovation of our study is that it develops a nested testing framework to select among a number of competing meta-analytic models. It also extends the new Andrews-Kasy meta-analytic estimators to allow for explanatory variables. We find that the overall, mean effect of FDI on entrepreneurial activity is close to zero and statistically insignificant. While FDI and entrepreneurial activity may each play an important role in economic development, our results indicate that FDI does not generally stimulate entrepreneurship. This suggests that public policy efforts to encourage entrepreneurship through FDI are unlikely to be successful. All the files necessary to reproduce the results in this paper are available online at Harvard Dataverse.

长期以来，研究人员一直将外国直接投资和企业家精神视为经济发展的潜在重要决定因素。因此，越来越多的文献研究外国直接投资是否刺激东道国的企业家活动。这些经验结果很难综合起来，因为许多研究使用了外国直接投资和企业家精神的不同定义，研究了不同的时期和国家，并采用了不同的估算程序来得出结果。为了更好地理解这些文献，我们从47项研究中收集了675项估计值，这些研究使用国家级数据估算了FDI与企业家活动之间的关系。我们使用元-分析以解决两个问题：（1）FDI对企业家精神的总体平均影响是什么？（2）哪些因素解释了跨研究的估计效果的差异？我们这项研究的创新之处在于，它开发了一个嵌套的测试框架，可以在许多竞争的元分析模型中进行选择。它还扩展了新的Andrews-Kasy meta-分析估计量，以允许使用解释变量。我们发现，外国直接投资对企业家活动的总体平均影响接近于零，在统计上微不足道。尽管外国直接投资和企业家活动可能各自在经济发展中发挥重要作用，但我们的结果表明，外国直接投资通常不会刺激企业家精神。这表明，通过外国直接投资鼓励企业家精神的公共政策努力不太可能成功。再现本文结果所必需的所有文件都可以从Harvard Dataverse在线获得。