Dr Jun Hou attended European International Business Academy 40^th Annual Conference in December 2014. During the conference, he presented paper “Unpacking the relationship between OFDI and innovation performance: the moderating effect of contextual factor”, co-authored with Professor Xiaolan Fu and Professor Xiaohui Liu. Dr Hou talked about the impact of OFDI on Chinese MNEs’ innovation performance. He presented the evidence of how Chinese MNEs successfully use OFDI as a channel to enlarge their knowledge base and resource pool. Interesting discussions were also carried out with other conference participants about the findings of moderating effect of firm characteristics and contextual factors. The impact of OFDI on innovation performance is contingent on firm characteristics, such as in-house R&D, knowledge-seeking motives and international experience and contextual factors, such as location and industries. 

At the EIBA 2014 conference, Dr Hou also presented another paper entitled “The impact of South-South integration on productivity performance of African firms”. In this research, they used a firm-level panel data to illustrate how trade liberalization improves the total factor productivity of manufacturing firm in Ghana. By distinguish the trade activities with China and OECD countries, the results also show that trading with countries having relatively similar technology level would provide firms in African countries more compatible technologies to learn and catch up.