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information about their home country could actually decrease investment in their country of origin. The positive effect of migrant networks on cross-national investment is predicated not only on the transmission of information, in general, but on the provision of information that allows the investor to make a higherthan-expected return. In efficient markets, investors can profit by exploiting costly or private information—information that is not (yet) available to all market participants. We argue that migrant networks facilitate crossborder investment by providing private information—either directly or through the familiarity channel—to investors. The aggregate nature of our data makes it difficult to directly test the effect of private information, so we follow Rauch and Trindade (2002) and argue that migrant networks should play a larger role in the trade of heterogeneous assets than in the trade in homogenous assets. This is because the information asymmetries associated with heterogeneous assets are significantly larger than those associated with homogenous assets. FDI opportunities vary by commodity class and by ownership stake and constitute a more heterogeneous class of investment opportunities than portfolio investment opportunities, which are defined by the issuing agency. Because FDI faces higher risks of expropriation, information about the investment environment is more valuable. We hypothesize, therefore, that the effect of migrant networks on FDI will be larger than the effect of migrant networks on portfolio investment, all else being equal. In the next section we discuss the empirical model, data, and variables used to test these hypotheses. Empirical results follow.
Empirical Model, Sample, Data, and Variables We embed our hypothesis tests within a gravity model of trade in financial assets. While traditionally used to study trade in commodities, the gravity model has recently been used to examine bilateral trade in financial assets. When applied to trade in financial assets, studies have also found that cross-national investment is a positive function of economic size, common language, shared colonial history, and a negative function of distance (for example, Eichengreen and Luengnaruemitchai 2006; Portes and Rey 2005). We take this augmented gravity model as our point of departure and use it to investigate the effect of migrant networks.