免签政策与外商直接投资：来自企业注册数据的证据

Abstract

China has progressively expanded visa-free entry for ordinary passport holders as part of its broader strategy to advance high-standard institutional opening-up, facilitate cross-border mobility, and anchor foreign investment amid global economic uncertainty. Against this backdrop, a critical question emerges: does liberalising short-term cross-border movement translate into tangible foreign investment entry? This paper addresses this question by treating the staggered roll-out of China's visa-free entry policy since 2023 as a quasi-natural experiment and estimating its causal effect on inward foreign direct investment (FDI). Utilising comprehensive nationwide business registration data, a city–source country–industry–month panel of newly established wholly foreign-owned enterprises spanning January 2023 to February 2026 is constructed, and a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) framework is employed for causal identification. The empirical strategy exploits exogenous cross-country variation in the timing of policy adoption to isolate the investment response to visa liberalisation. The empirical findings demonstrate that the visa-free entry policy significantly increases the incidence of new foreign-invested enterprise registrations from eligible source countries, a result that withstands an extensive battery of identification and robustness checks. The mechanism analysis points to three distinct channels through which the policy operates: first, by signalling a credible commitment to continued openness and reinforcing expectations of policy durability; second, by enhancing the international discursive environment surrounding China; and third, by mitigating cross-border soft-information frictions through the facilitation of face-to-face contacts and information flows, thereby attenuating informational asymmetries in investment decisions. The treatment effect exhibits meaningful heterogeneity. It is amplified where pre-policy people-to-people exchanges and international air connectivity were more developed, for larger-scale investment projects, for source economies with smaller time-zone differentials relative to China, in industries with higher capital intensity, where bilateral diaspora networks are more extensive, and notably, for foreign entry into service sectors. A further exploration reveals that the policy effect is particularly pronounced in source-country–city–industry cells characterised by stronger antecedent export ties to China and a more substantial historical investment footprint. Collectively, these patterns suggest that visa liberalisation operates with particular efficacy in accelerating the materialisation of prospective projects for which market intelligence, commercial relationships, or preliminary investment inclinations have already been established. This paper makes three distinct contributions to the literature. First, it examines the determinants of foreign direct investment through the lens of cross-border personnel mobility. By exploiting the staggered roll-out of the ordinary-passport visa-waiver policy and combining it with comprehensive nationwide business registration data, the paper furnishes micro-level evidence on how short-term cross-border mobility influences foreign investment entry, thereby extending the frontier of research on FDI determinants beyond conventional economic and institutional factors. Second, it advances an institutional account of the investment effects of visa policy. The analysis demonstrates that visa-free entry promotes foreign investment through three interrelated mechanisms – policy signalling, improvements in the external information environment, and reductions in information asymmetry – thus broadening the analytical framework for understanding the economic consequences of short-term cross-border movement. Third, it offers novel evidence for evaluating the latest round of ordinary-passport visa-free arrangements and provides empirical foundations for refining the design of visa-free entry policies and enhancing their complementary institutional infrastructure. Beyond the immediate policy implications, these findings offer practical guidance for strengthening international communication, improving post-entry business services, facilitating investment matching, and aligning visa facilitation with international air connectivity.