Journal of International Business Studies最新文献

Academics and practitioners are increasingly concerned about global zombieism, a term used to describe insolvent firms that survive with the support of financial institutions, investors, or governments, particularly during unusual market conditions. Using dual-filters of interest coverage ratio and an empirically validated default prediction model, we propose a new measure to gauge the extent of zombieism in the world’s 20 largest economies. The average zombie share of listed firms has increased significantly since 1990, to about 7% in 2020. Zombie firms are typically found among small and medium-sized enterprises. Economic growth, industry compositions, and lenient monetary policies have strong explanatory power for global zombieism. We show that the presence of zombie firms generates significant market congestion, limiting the growth of healthy firms. We also find that the development of global corporate bond markets contributes to zombie firm growth. Leveraging staggered bankruptcy reforms as an exogenous variation, we find that these reforms lower zombie ratio by 1.4% points. The reduction is more substantial if the bankruptcy law becomes more creditor-friendly. Having failed to recover, zombie firms can survive for an average of 5 years before declaring bankruptcy, being delisted, or being acquired. Bankruptcy reforms accelerate the dissolution of zombie status.

Abstract

While multinational enterprises (MNEs) are widely recognized for providing employment to a significant number of women around the globe, empirical evidence suggests that existing gender inequalities may be aggravated rather than alleviated in their subsidiaries. We build on gender theory to better understand how gender is construed and enacted differently in MNE subsidiaries compared to domestic firms, particularly with regard to the differential effects of parenthood on wage gaps for male versus female employees. Because of the relatively more demanding working conditions in MNE subsidiaries and their gendered policies and practices, we hypothesize that the motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus are larger in MNE subsidiaries than in domestic firms. Using an extensive database of micro-level data of over 36,500 employees in 57 countries, we find a larger fatherhood bonus in MNE subsidiaries compared to domestic firms, but no significant difference in the motherhood penalty. Our results suggest that shifting entrenched gendered social beliefs and divisions of household labor is not the only pathway to gender equality, and call for a critical examination of gender-related values, perceptions, policies, and practices in MNEs, beyond a focus on supporting women (with children). We discuss managerial, theoretical, and societal implications accordingly.

In the real world of international business, machine learning (ML) is well established as an essential element in many operations, from finance and logistics to marketing and strategy. However, ML as an analytical tool is still far from widespread in international business (IB) as a science. In this article, we offer arguments as to why this should change by providing illustrative analyses with simulated and real data. We argue that IB as a research community could produce substantial progress if algorithmic ML techniques were adopted as part of the standard analytical toolkit, next to traditional probabilistic statistics. This is not only so because ML improves predictive accuracy but also because doing so would permit empirically addressing complexity and facilitate theory development in IB that does justice to the complex world of international businesses. Along the way, we provide tips and tricks by way of practical tutorial, all relating to a typical ML process pipeline.

Abstract

Global location choices for foreign direct investments by MNCs aim to benefit both from the advantages of collocation with other activities of the firm (internal agglomeration) and the advantages of proximity to local industry clusters of similar activities (external agglomeration). We submit that there are important trade-offs between internal and external agglomeration because internal knowledge transfer associated with collocation of various value-chain activities of the MNC is confronted with greater risk of knowledge spillovers to rival firms if there is a substantial local cluster. Moreover, we argue that the international connectivity of a location reduces the importance of local agglomeration as a driver of investment location decisions because connectivity allows the MNC to reap benefits from agglomeration at a distance through the (temporary) transfer of people and knowledge. Connectivity changes the trade-offs between internal and external agglomeration because it enhances the spatial reach of internal agglomeration more than external agglomeration. The influence of connectivity is greater for service-related value-chain activities than for production-related activities. We find support for these hypotheses in an analysis of 38,873 greenfield cross-border investment decisions across diverse value-chain activities and industries in 71 global cities, 2008–2016.

Despite the volume of research and significant advancements in the country-of-origin (CO) area, the topic remains contentious in two key areas. One area is the presence of tensions and contradictions associated with origin-related research. The second relates to an over-reliance on relatively narrow theories that can neither address disparities nor capture a range of CO ecosystem considerations critical to the effective use of results in addressing firm-level planning and outcomes. Our examination of the business-to-consumer CO literature details the characteristics of published work and highlights the substantive contributions of the 50 most influential publications, with the overarching goal of accommodating meaningful future research. We examine 417 journal articles (551 studies) published from 1962 to 2022 to extract important granular characteristics of the literature and to summarize the findings of the most influential CO contributions. We also report the results of two surveys of academic researchers and US exporters and importers examining CO’s role in research and practice. Finally, we propose a theoretical lens, the paradox theory, as a basis for considering and framing competing aspects of the CO ecosystem and recommend the use of multilevel modeling to link future studies to marketing strategy and performance outcomes, thus advancing CO research.

Abstract

Migration is one of the most pressing global issues of our time. However, relatively little is known about the factors and mechanisms that govern the post-migration experiences of skilled migrants. We adopt an acculturation- and social identity-based approach to examine how differences between institutional characteristics in the destination and origin country, as well as migrants’ experiences with formal and informal institutions shape their identification with the destination and origin country and contribute to their community and career embeddedness. Our study of 1709 highly skilled migrants from 48 origin countries in 12 destination countries reveals that the institutional environment migrants encounter provides both sources of opportunity (potential for human development and value-congruent societal practices) and sources of disadvantage (experienced ethnocentrism and downgrading). These contrasting dynamics affect migrants’ destination-country identification, their origin-country identification and, ultimately, their embeddedness in the destination country. Our results have important implications for multinational enterprises and policy makers that can contribute to enhancing skilled migrants’ community and career embeddedness. For example, these actors may nurture a work environment and provide supportive policies that buffer against the institutional sources of disadvantage we identified in this study, while helping migrants to leverage the opportunities available in the destination country.

Status is an important intangible asset, yet when firms enter new countries, they lack standing in new social hierarchies as outsiders. Conventional wisdom suggests embeddedness in host-country networks can alleviate newcomers’ liability of outsidership. We complement this with insights from status signaling theory: Newcomers in host countries can address their liability of outsidership through the visual display of social affiliations. We utilize a novel visual qualitative research approach that analyzes annual report photographs of an emerging-market family business, depicting the firm’s leaders with high-status alters. Complementing the international business literature, which emphasizes strong ties to host-country business partners, we identify three signaling mechanisms that are more circuitous: bypass (host-country affiliations beyond the firm’s industry), allusion (global affiliations beyond the host country and industry, often celebrities), and aspiration (global industry affiliations). We also suggest that such diffuse status signaling mechanisms may be especially salient in emerging-market family firms investing in developed markets, which are accorded low status in many developed markets. These firms feature firm/owner identity overlaps, long leader tenures, and a tendency to build reputation through prosocial behavior, facilitating the activation of status signaling tactics through ephemeral affiliations with high-status actors situated in world society.

Cultural industries help build creativity-based economies and stimulate worldwide cultural interchanges, but this process faces constraints. One such constraint is unequal treatment of genders. When female artists export cultural products, they face a “liability of gender”, defined as gender specific difficulties in overcoming the liability of foreignness. Both audiences’ gendered expectations and artists’ lack of information about foreign markets will lower women artists’ probability of successfully exporting cultural products, relative to their male counterparts. Differences in education and social network connections strengthen this effect. To investigate this relation and discover how it can be counteracted, we study Korean artists from 2000 to 2015. We document that female artists have more difficulty exhibiting in foreign galleries than males, yet these negative effects can be mitigated by elite education and by participation in art residency programs. Residency programs help female artists to develop networks from their interactions with female peers, but these benefits erode quickly relative to the benefits of education. These findings help us understand how to create a level playing field across genders in worldwide cultural exchanges and suggest that network building institutions such as the art residency programs can effectively reduce gender inequality.

Global employee mobility is a very important concern for multinational enterprises (MNEs), as such individuals are critical strategic human capital resources for MNEs. Ensuring that expatriates (one type of globally mobile employees) maintain high organizational commitment and assignment completion intentions (“attachment” to international posting) is a critical consideration for MNEs’ human resources management. However, we have a very limited understanding of how the configurations of structures (decentralization, formalization, and global knowledge integration) – practices set in place to control and coordinate foreign subsidiaries by MNEs – influence expatriates’ attachments during international assignments. We address this research question by adopting the structural contingency theory and extending it to examine the impact of structural configurations on expatriate managers’ outcomes. We develop and test a set of hypotheses using survey data obtained from 192 expatriate general managers employed by nine American global hotel chains. We find that these three structural characteristics create various configurations differing in their effectiveness in retaining expatriates’ attachment outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of examining configurations of structural characteristics, which underscores the difficulties of managing expatriate managers for MNEs as well as providing further insights into the complexities associated with structural configurations necessary to manage them well.

This research employs a difference-in-differences framework to study the impact of major board reforms on the performance of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Using an international sample of board reforms implemented in 61 countries from 1985 to 2021, we document a drastic redistribution of wealth from target shareholders to acquirer shareholders after the board reforms in target countries. This effect is most pronounced in M&A transactions that involve the sale of controlling shares, thereby supporting the hypothesis that corporate board reforms mitigate the private benefits of control in the target firm. Furthermore, these reforms increase expected deal synergies, in that deal-level announcement returns are higher after the implementation of the reforms. When country-level institutional quality and legal protection of shareholders are greater, it reinforces the reform effects. Overall M&A activity remains unchanged following the reforms, yet financial bidders complete fewer transactions, implying a reform-induced squeeze-out of financial bidders from the M&A market in the target country. Collectively, these international results are consistent with the predictions of the private benefits of control theory and underscore the role of institutional quality and investor protection in reinforcing the effects of board reforms worldwide.