Location choice and Indian outward foreign direct investment: institutional thresholds and differentiating between institutional quality and institutional distance

Institutions matter as regards foreign location investment decisions, but how they matter and in what ways, is still unsettled. We differentiate between absolute and relative institutional effects on both location choice and on the size of the FDI and do so by examining India's outward FDI flows between 2008 and 2020. We find that absolute and relative institutional measures have different effects, and these are noticeable at different stages. We show that the quality of institutions affects location choice, but once they have made that decision then the scale of the investment is impacted by institutional threshold effects and institutional distance, and we explain why this could be the case. We provide further nuance to studies on the asymmetrical effects of institutions on outward FDI. We provide empirical evidence that the effects of absolute institutions matter more where host countries lie at the lower end of the institutional profile distribution. Likewise with institutional distance—it might not be the direction of the difference that matters so much as where the host country is located along the institutional profile distribution. This has substantial consequences from both a managerial and a policy perspective.