This doctoral thesis is composed by three articles about the influence of the external factors shaping the foreign direct investment (FDI). I propose three discussions specifically about the institutional environment and macroeconomic conditions shaping the FDI behavior. First, the study analyzes the impact of country-specific macroeconomic variables on outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) flows from Brazil. I have applied a vector auto-regression (VAR) in order to determine the key drivers of OFDI flows, and tested the variables for Granger causality. This study improves on previous empirical analyses about home country determinants of outward FDI, which have proposed comparable time series models, mostly with inconclusive results. I argue that some of these studies have been biased by ill-conditioning arising from the estimation of too many factors with too few data points. This study corrects this by using a thresholded VAR, which explicitly imposes a parsimony restriction to the number of coefficients to be estimated. The results corroborate theoretical models of OFDI, and shed more light on the macroeconomic drivers of foreign direct investment from an emerging economy, using Brazil as a case study. In sequence, I discuss the impact of corruption levels on FDI. I have applied a panel data set in order to determine the duration of FDI flows invested abroad based on the corruption levels of the host countries. I argue that the time of permanence of FDI flows could varies since the existence of corruption levels, since the existence of weak institutional environment would create unfavorable conditions, and also shaping the kind of FDI projects which means a short or long term duration. Finally, I propose a discussion on the effectiveness of institutional environment regarding law application and its impact on the firm’s performance. Specifically, I test the conjecture of how different institutional environment perceptions (represented by firms’ expectations about the legal system) result in different performance levels of firms. I contend that the mere existence of a law system does not ensure their enforcement. Therefore, firms respond distinctively towards each environment to increase their performance. This suggests the need to examine more carefully the interaction of institutions.