Abstract
Studies of political risk and foreign direct investments (FDI) have traditionally been conducted at the national level, with aggregate numbers of inward FDI serving as the dependent variable. This thesis approaches the relationship between political risk and FDI by putting multinational petroleum companies, and their allocation of upstream FDI, at the centre of attention. As the theoretical departure, the thesis applies Dunning's eclectic OLI framework, of which the O stands for ownership specific advantages. Ownership specific advantages, which in this thesis are conceptualised along the lines of company size and state ownership, I argue, are critical to the risk mitigation capacity of multinational petroleum companies. To analyse whether O-specific advantages can moderate the effect of political risk, the thesis applies logistic multilevel modelling, in which the focal points are cross level interactions between, on one hand, ownership specific advantages, and on the other hand, five different sources of political risk. With regard to the moderating effect of company size, the results, somewhat surprisingly, indicate that larger multinational petroleum companies are less likely to be present in countries with higher levels of political risk. Analysing the moderating effect of state ownership, the results are more in line the proposed hypotheses, as state owned companies are likelier than their private counterpart, to be present in high risk countries. Following regression diagnostics and robustness test, the results did prove robust against several alterations of the sample. However, the tests also revealed that influential observations and the operatinalisations are contributing to the results. To explain the results the thesis applies several theoretical perspectives, from which implications are drawn along the lines of contingent and institutional ownership specific advantages.