Sovereign Wealth Funds’ Cross-border Investments: Assessing the Role of Country-level Drivers and Spatial Competition

Malik Kerkour¹, Jean-Yves Gnabo¹, Nicolas Debarsy²

The aim of this paper is to identify the driving forces of cross-border investments emanating from Sovereign wealth funds and to test the existence of spatial competition among recipient countries. For this, we develop an original econometric framework that quantifies the role of spatial dependence in the location of investments, and that uses a modified version of the standard estimation procedure of spatial panel model, which accommodates the Inverse Hyperbolic Sine transformation of the dependent variable. This transformation copes with two critical features of net capital flows, namely an highly skewed distribution and the presence of zero and negative values. Using a large-scale database, we provide evidence of negative spatial dependence, investments in one country being on average at the expense of its neighbors.