Does Less Bureaucracy Promote Foreign Direct Investment? Assessing
the Impact of the Legal Framework for Startups
Does Less Bureaucracy Promote Foreign Direct Investment? Assessing
the Impact of the Legal Framework for Startups
We study the effect of the Legal Framework for Startups (LFS) in Brazil on
the registration of foreign direct investment (FDI) by Brazilian startups.
Leveraging the exogenous timing of the policy’s enactment, we employ a
difference-in-differences design comparing startups affected by the policy to
firms that were not. Using micro-identified records of foreign acquisitions
from the Brazilian Central Bank and firm registers from the Brazilian Federal
Revenue, we identify the timing of foreign operations and firm characteristics,
respectively. We document an increase in the probability of startups
registering foreign investment following the implementation of the LFS.
These results remain consistent across different sectors and are robust to
placebo tests, including altering the timing of the LFS implementation and
randomizing firm assignments to treatment and control groups. However, our
results should be interpreted with caution. Restricting the sample to include
only firms established before the enactment of the LFS leads to a loss of
statistical significance, suggesting that part of the LFS’s impact on FDI
inflows is driven by the creation of new startups.