This paper studies bilateral cultural preferences as an asymmetric dimension of cultural proximity and estimates their effect on greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI). We derive a gravity equation of FDI and test simultaneously the impact of both (a) the preferences of investing countries for recipients' culture and (b) recipients' preferences for the culture in the investing economies. While the role of investors' preferences can be rationalised with existing supply-side gravity theories of FDI, we propose new mechanisms to explain why recipients' preferences might matter as well. We use exports and imports of cultural goods to proxy for the two directions of cultural preferences. Our results reveal a stronger investment effect of the recipients' preferences, a channel so far understudied.

中文翻译：

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不对称的文化邻近性和绿地外国直接投资

本文研究了双边文化偏好作为文化接近度的非对称维度，并估计了它们对绿地外国直接投资 ( FDI ) 的影响。我们推导出FDI的引力方程并同时测试 (a) 投资国对接受国文化的偏好和 (b) 接受国对投资经济体文化的偏好的影响。虽然投资者偏好的作用可以用现有的FDI供给侧引力理论合理化，我们提出了新的机制来解释为什么接收者的偏好也很重要。我们用文化产品的出口和进口来代表文化偏好的两个方向。我们的结果揭示了接受者偏好的更强投资效应，这是迄今为止尚未充分研究的渠道。