Journal of International Business Studies最新文献

Universal banking powers are permissions for a nation’s banks to provide financial services beyond “plain vanilla” banking activities. Some nations restrict banking activities to only services such as loans and deposits, while others permit commercial banks to also engage in investment banking, insurance underwriting, and/or real estate investment activities. Despite the research and policy importance of this issue, the literature essentially neglects how these powers affect the primary role of banks in creating liquidity for society. We formulate two competing hypotheses as to whether more universal banking powers increase versus decrease domestic bank liquidity creation based on theories of risk absorption, relationship banking, and scope economies/diseconomies. We test which hypothesis empirically dominates using data from 85 nations over 15 years. The data strongly support the hypothesis that universal powers boost domestic bank liquidity creation. These findings are robust to addressing endogeneity, controlling for bank regulations, macroeconomic conditions, and institutional variables, and conducting subsample analyses. We also test for international arbitrage – whether the foreign subsidiaries of banks from more restrictive countries create more liquidity in host countries with fewer restrictions – and find support for this arbitrage. Collectively, these results provide important research and policy implications.

Family-owned MNEs (FMNEs) face unique challenges for their newly established foreign subsidiaries due to the information asymmetry and divergent demands between the controlling families and external stakeholders. Despite the significant theoretical and managerial implications, there has been a notable research gap in understanding how FMNEs strategically disclose information to overcome these challenges. Drawing from literature on firms’ stakeholder management and responses to institutional pressure, we propose that FMNEs seek a compensating approach to reconcile various stakeholders’ divergent needs, mitigate information asymmetry, and enhance legitimacy. The compensating approach encompasses both the content and amount of information disclosed. Specifically, FMNEs selectively conceal information sensitive to socioemotional wealth (SEW) to protect the core interests of the controlling families. Simultaneously, they voluntarily disclose more information to signal professionalization to external stakeholders, alleviating concerns associated with higher family involvement. We further argue that transparency pressure in FMNEs’ home context amplifies their utilization of compensating information disclosure. Our arguments are generally supported by analyzing 850 newly established foreign subsidiaries from both FMNEs and non-FMNEs between 2010 and 2017.

Over the last decade, the green shoots of a new economic order have emerged as decentralized technologies challenge traditional financial systems. Decentralized finance (DeFi) holds the potential to transform international business (IB) by offering accessible financial services across borders, disrupting traditional intermediaries, and promoting financial inclusion. While traditional fintech has challenged banks, DeFi operates outside legacy systems, leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracting to introduce a new range of products and services that provide first-movers with an upper hand to both expand their business across the globe as well realize cost savings on existing business. Despite offering advantages like efficiency, transparency, and security, DeFi faces regulatory uncertainties and scalability, adoption, and stability concerns. Our study explores how DeFi can seamlessly integrate into the IB space while addressing these challenges. In addition to offering insights for investors, multinational firms, and regulators, we also lay the groundwork for future IB research in the fintech domain. As the DeFi innovation unfolds, understanding and harnessing its potential can empower stakeholders to engage responsibly and effectively in this transformative landscape.

We contend that the Uppsala internationalisation process (IP) Model offers the basis, yet unrealised, for a process theory of growth of the internationalising firm. From the Model’s origins, particularly in Penrosean theory, we develop this potential by offering a theory extension that explicates the organisational changes within the firm required to sustain international growth. This repositioning distinguishes us from previous attempts to amend, supplant or extend the IP Model. In developing the theory extension, we specify how we remain faithful to the IP Model’s behavioural assumption ground. We provide a model of the internationalising firm that posits non-linear growth paths. This is due to the challenges of synchronising the external opportunity seeking of the firm as it expands internationally with the internal capacity building required to realise these opportunities. Introducing to the IB field this asynchronicity problem, an absence of temporal concurrence, we show its potential in explaining organisational changes and discontinuities in the internationalising firm’s development as it seeks to grow. By extending the IP Model to offer a theory of growth of the internationalising firm, we provide the basis for further process scholarship on this topic that addresses contemporary concerns and developments.

The international bond market is the largest component of the international capital markets. Previous research shows that the liability of foreignness (LOF) imposes significant costs on international debt contracting. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of foreign institutional shareholders (FISs) on the costs of international debt contracting. While the presence of FISs could lead to a reduction in LOF-related costs, it can also lead to an increase in the costs arising from agency conflicts between shareholders and bondholders. We examine the impact of FISs on the prevalence of restrictive bond covenants using a sample of 956 Yankee bonds from 26 countries over the period 2001–2019. We find a significantly negative relationship between FIS ownership and bond covenants. This inverse relationship is strongest for U.S. institutional ownership, and for covenants designed to mitigate opportunistic behavior such as claim dilution and wealth transfers. We also show that the inverse relationship between U.S. institutional ownership and bond covenants is moderated by variables related to corporate governance, information asymmetry, and agency costs of debt. Additional analyses show that U.S. institutional ownership has a significant pricing effect on Yankee bond investors by lowering an issuer’s cost of borrowing.

A well-established body of international business research examines how the institutional environment influences corporate decisions. We add to this literature by investigating the unexplored link between family, a fundamental institution in human society, and corporate tax decisions. Applying theories on social norms and the evolution of moral boundaries, we argue that the strength of family ties in a society increases corporate tax avoidance by narrowing the scope of moral responsibilities. We confirm this argument by conducting regression analyses using a large sample of firms from 44 countries. In addition, the positive effect of family ties on tax avoidance is attenuated for firms in countries with inclusive political institutions and is amplified for family firms. Using a sample of U.S. companies, we also find that firms avoid more taxes when they are located in states with stronger family ties and when their CEOs are from countries with stronger family ties, indicating that both the social norms that surround firms and those that are embedded in the origin countries of the managers affect firm tax decisions. Our study implies that the institution of family provides a valuable perspective to understand the international differences in corporate behaviors.

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.