International Business Review最新文献

Deep learning is used to analyze temporal trade flow data from 62 countries from 2017 to 2021. The model incorporates 63 explanatory country fixed effects and country-pair psychic distance stimuli. This advanced computer-age statistical approach goes beyond the limitations of traditional OLS regression. The model demonstrates that country fixed effects contribute at least as much to the variations in trade flows as do the distance-related factors. The study also shows that distance stimuli related to democracy, education, and religion do not negatively influence trade flows. Remarkably, the deep learning model can effectively train itself solely on country fixed effects. This prompts a reevaluation of the classic trade flow gravity model, which typically places heavy reliance on distance-related variables.

International business research often links the cultural and institutional characteristics of countries to the features of the individuals inhabiting these countries. A distinct approach to analyzing such multilevel problems with deep learning and explainable artificial intelligence methods is presented, using country characteristics as explicit spatial coordinates. Deep learning is tolerant of noise and faults and can approximate arbitrarily complex mathematical structures by developing multiple abstractions. An applied example demonstrates the applicability of this approach by exploring the effect of personal-care advertising spending in 27 countries on the subjective happiness of 376,442 individuals, indicating a statistically significant positive effect, albeit with a trivial effect size.

This review problematizes literature on export assistance, one of the oldest and most significant topics in export research. Problematization embraces selective but broad literature, reflexivity, hermeneutical reading of text, and inclusion of the author’s voice. The sample comprises 95 studies published between 1968 and 2022. The review makes two critical contributions. First, it offers a synopsis of extant knowledge through an organizing framework which highlights the roles of governments, export promotion agencies, foreign trade offices and trade support institutions, in the design and deployment of onshore and offshore export assistance. In so doing, the review demonstrates that scholarship on export assistance can be summarized in four I’s – impetus, interventions, initiatives, and impact. Second, it uses two-sided non-refutational arguments to elaborate that while export assistance is possibly the most mature construct in export research, there are numerous unresolved questions. The areas of debate offer a platform for guiding practice and for setting an agenda for future studies.

International business studies show that multinational enterprises generally invest in locations with fewer political risks, but that this may not always apply to emerging-market multinational enterprises, due to the specific characteristics of their home countries. In this paper, we examine the impact of political risk on the location decisions of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and explore the legitimacy of firms from China in different host countries as a moderator of the relationship between political risk and location choice. Our empirical investigation is based on an original database of 617 foreign direct investment (FDI) location-choice decisions made by 240 Chinese SMEs between 2006 and 2017. The results show that political risk deters Chinese SMEs from choosing certain locations, but political and economic legitimacy positively mitigate this relationship. Combining the political institutions approach and legitimacy-based view of political risk, we contribute novel insights into the role of legitimacy of firms from the same country of origin in emerging market SMEs’ strategic choices of FDI location.

For a sample of 25,749 international firm-year observations, we evaluate the relationship between shareholders’ time orientation, firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR), and the cost of equity capital. We find evidence that patient institutional investors monitor the CSR strategy of the firms in which they invest to the extent that the CSR practices of these firms lower their cost of equity capital. Further analysis indicates that this effect is less pronounced when strong national institutions are in place, making monitoring by patient institutional investors unnecessary. Our results reinforce the idea that CSR can be beneficial by lowering the cost of capital as long as adequate control mechanisms are in place.

In this paper, we provide a better understanding of what drives sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) to improve their governance. Using the most recent SWF governance scoreboard from Maire et al. (2021), we estimate a fractional response model to determine whether SWF governance disclosure norms are driven by the search for internal or external legitimacy. Overall, we find that SWFs have better governance when they originate from democratic countries with high-quality, national governance. Our results also show that SWFs tend to have better governance quality when they need to acquire external legitimacy vis-à-vis the target company and its government. In particular, we find that SWFs have an incentive to improve their governance when they are sufficiently internationalized, when the amount of foreign assets invested abroad is sufficiently large or when the amount of shares acquired in developed countries is significant. These findings demonstrate how SWFs may proactively build legitimacy in host countries when they need to adapt their foreign entry strategies. Our results have important implications for understanding the determinants of SWF governance in general.

This research investigates the role of relational norms in facilitating importers' engagement in product innovation co-development with exporters. Through a qualitative approach, we conducted interviews with top managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) involved in exporting activities in France. Guided by the theoretical framework of Relational Exchange Theory (Macneil, 1980; Dwyer et al., 1987), our study uncovers the significant potential for successful product innovation co-development when importers actively contribute as knowledge sources and co-developers. Additionally, we highlight the importance of cooperation, continuity expectations, and equity norms as external factors that shape the co-development process of new products between exporters and importers. By comprehending and embracing these relational norms, exporters can strengthen their collaborative endeavors with importers and effectively drive the co-development of innovative products.

This conceptual paper argues that the role and development of regional headquarters (RHQ) is dependent on and determined by intense power relations and political interactions with interdependent actors in the multinational enterprise (MNE). We demonstrate how studies to date on the RHQ have focused on exploring its bridging function as either administrative or entrepreneurial in managing trade-offs between global and local contexts. Equally, we suggest that research on MNE power and politics has concentrated on understanding the power dynamics that exist in the corporate headquarters (CHQ)-subsidiary relationship. By combining and enriching these disparate works of literature, we conceptualise how the RHQ role shapes, and in turn is shaped by, political struggles, diverging interests, and conflictual tensions at critical interfaces across the MNE. A novel contribution from our paper is the development of a typology that conceptualises how RHQ role variations are defined by the RHQ’s loaned power over subsidiaries as well as its owned power over CHQ.

In view of the paucity of scholarly work on how conditions in weak institutional environments at organizational founding can persist leading to eventual international joint ventures (IJVs), this paper utilizes the case of Virgin Nigeria Airways to illuminate our understanding of the subject. Based on semi-structured interviews, we developed a four-phase model that demonstrates the persistent interactions of internal and external factors. The four phases are as follows: pre-formation resource mobilization, formation and embryonic challenges, decoupling and rebranding, and phasing out. Phase 1 highlights political and non-political activities geared towards venture formation and resource mobilization. Phase 2 focuses on the decoupling of functional activities and the loss of legitimacy in response to changing political and economic conditions in the country. Phase 3 sheds light on triggers for corporate rebranding activities resulting from loss of identity and legitimacy. In Phase 4, we highlight the dispute with the government that typified and culminated in the airline's demise. We identify and examine the implications of these findings.

We examine how technology-focused innovation-based fast internationalizers’ (TIFIs’) performance measures change as they mature. Based on 42 interviews with Australian entrepreneurs and industry experts, we show that young TIFIs employ exploratory strategies for developing cutting-edge solutions and prefer using subjective measures for assessing their export performance. Later, becoming more complex organizations, employing exploitative strategies, they use additional objective, profit-based measures. The implications of destructive forces (e.g., COVID-19) to the performance of these firms were modest. Due to being digitally-based industry disruptors, they remain focused on innovation as the source of their independence and survival. Their creativity drives constant change/disruption to industries, requiring back-and-forth movement among exploratory and exploitative strategies, integrating subjective and objective performance measure simultaneously, as their new-to-the-world solutions are developed to withhold ‘creative destruction’ over time.