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This chapter examines the role of formal and informal institutions in foreign direct investment (FDI) dynamics.

We examine the effects of the quality of legal, political, and economic formal institution as well as the effect of institutional distance (based on new dataset) on bilateral inward FDI stocks in 34 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for the period 1990–2010 using a gravity specification. Additionally, we also examine FDI for the effects of a specific informal institution – attitude of the public toward economic liberal issues. Reactions of FDI to liberal and nonliberal public opinion (part of informal institutions) are examined with and without controlling for formal institutions.

Findings show that the quality of legal and political institutions are important determinants of FDI, that legal and political institutional distance are both significant obstacles to FDI, and that public opinion also matters. We find that it is important to control for formal institutions when looking at the effect of informal institutions, and that both past liberal and nonliberal public opinion correlate with FDI, but only nonliberal public opinion significantly reduces inward FDI directly.

Results are relevant for enterprises’ investment strategies, marketing strategies influencing public opinion as well as for policy makers, and governmental agencies involved in investment promotion programs.

Exploring the interplay between formal and informal institutions, institutional quality, institutional distance, and their effect on FDI in a bilateral panel.

The African continent is filled with a textured history, vast resources, and immense opportunity. The landscape of higher education on such a diverse continent is extensive and complex. In this review of the landscape, four primary topics are evaluated. The historical context is the foundational heading, which briefly covers the evolution from colonization to independence and the knowledge economy. The second main heading builds upon the historical context to provide an overview of the numerous components of higher education, including language diversity, institutional type, and access to education. A third section outlines key challenges and opportunities including finance, governance, organizational effectiveness, and the academic core. Each of these challenges and opportunities is interconnected and moves from external influences (e.g., fiscal and political climate) to internal influences (e.g., administrative leadership and faculty roles). The last layer of the landscape focuses on leveraging higher education in Africa for social and economic progress and development. Shaping a higher education system around principles of the public good and generating social benefits is important for including postsecondary institutions in a development strategy.

This chapter contributes to the existing literature on institutional theory and international business research by integrating the concepts of polycentrism and institutional learning to examine how MNEs from emerging economies invest in developed countries. We argue that equity-based market entry modes and non-equity-based modes create different needs for learning about economic, regulatory and political institutions; entry modes with or without local partners lead to different levels of institutional embeddedness and institutional learning speeds. Finally, the content of institutional knowledge also determines its transferability and adaptability. We emphasize the importance of recognizing the integrated nature of economic, regulatory and political institutions from a polycentric perspective and discuss their change in different situations.

In this chapter we review the recent and growing literature on medium-term growth patterns. This strand of research emerged from the realization that for most countries economic development is a highly unstable process; over a course of a few decades, a typical country enjoys periods of rapid growth as well episodes of stagnation and economic decline. This approach highlights the complex nature of growth and implies that studying transitions between periods of fast growth, stagnation, and collapse is essential for understanding the process of long run growth. We document recent efforts to characterize and study such growth transitions. We also update and extend some of our earlier research. Specifically, we use historical data from Maddison to confirm a link between political institutions and propensity to experience large swings in growth. We also study the role of institutions and macroeconomic policies, such as inflation, openness to trade, size of government, and real exchange rate overvaluation, in the context of growth transitions. We find surprisingly complex effects of some policies. For example, trade makes fast growth more likely but also increases the frequency of crises. The size of government reduces the likelihood of fast miracle-like growth while at the same time limiting the risk of stagnation. Moreover, these effects are nonlinear and dependent on the quality of institutions. We conclude by highlighting potentially promising areas for future research.

If donors cannot even agree about what institutions are and do not clearly understand how to promote deliberate institutional change, then what are ideas and assumptions that inform their institutional reforms? In each wave of reforms, donors’ interventions and practices have been grounded in layers of unjustified assumptions – explicit or implicit – on the nature of institutions and institutional change, rather than on robust empirical research and analysis of lessons from previous reforms. These assumptions, despite evidence from previous reforms that they are misguided, have been accumulated and passed on to newcomers in the donor community. These assumptions are referred to here as myths.

While many studies on institutional environment have primarily focused on the influence of the host country environment, limited insights have been offered on how the different dimensions of home institutions affect firm internationalization. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the effects of regulatory institutions at home.

Using country governance quality to proxy quality of regulatory institutions, this study attempts to reveal how regulatory institutions at home facilitate a multinational enterprise's (MNE's) international expansion and why the influence differs in different country clusters. Using hierarchical linear modeling and cluster analysis, proposed hypotheses were tested with a three‐year panel of 511 firms from 38 countries.

The results provide substantial support for the authors' hypotheses that MNEs with high governance quality at home are more engaged in internationalization than those with low governance quality at home. Moreover, differences in institutional effect do exist between country clusters.

This study provides evidence that while country differences exist, governance quality at home can facilitate MNEs' expansion into foreign markets. This finding will help managers of any MNEs to consider country‐level factors and evaluate the governance quality at home before committing resources into foreign operations.

Building on the institutional environment literature, this theory and results make original contributions by underscoring how the consideration of regulatory institutions at home can significantly improve understanding of institutional influence on MNEs. The findings have important implications for both international business researchers and managers of MNEs.

Anchored mainly on the institutional theory and resource-based view, this study endeavors to investigate the interplay between home country institutional environment (economic, regulatory and socio-cultural environment), export market orientation and export performance. Besides, this study also aims to examine the moderating role of firm resources (knowledge-based and managerial resources) in the associations between home country institutions and export market orientation.

Drawing on data from a sample of 221 exporting firms in Turkey, the conceptual model is empirically examined by structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that regulatory environment is conducive to the improvement of export market orientation, which is instrumental in cultivating export performance. Importantly, empirical evidence also proves that higher levels of knowledge-based and managerial resources strengthen the linkage between home country institutions and export market orientation.

Integrating institutional theory with the resource-based view, this research considerably contributes to the current understanding of the export market orientation phenomenon by filling the knowledge gap on the differential impacts of home country’s economic, regulatory and socio-cultural environment on export market orientation. Moreover, this study provides worthwhile insights into the moderating effect of knowledge-based and managerial resources on home country institutions and export market orientation and the interrelationship between export market orientation and export performance in an emerging economy.

Much of existing research has attempted to explain Asian Growth Paradox through formal institution – role of the government or rule of law. Therefore, this paper attempts to empirically explain the paradox with informal institution including interaction between informal and formal institutions. Two interrelated research questions summarize this research. First, how can we capture the relationship between informal and formal institutions? Then, how is that relationship different for Asian Paradox states vs non-paradox states?

To capture the relationship between informal and formal institutions, we use Helmke and Levitsky (2004)'s framework to categorize the interaction as complementing, competing, substituting and accommodating. We perform cross-sectional regression analysis for more than 130 countries.

We find that the developed, developing and the Asian Paradox states display different patterns of interaction between informal and formal institutions. However, we also find that the interaction effect has a limited value explaining growth for most of these countries, suggesting that Helmke and Levitsky (2004)'s framework has limitations. Finally, we challenge the notion of Asian Paradox states, as countries outside of Asia also qualify as the Paradox states.

Not much empirical effort has examined how different relationships between informal and formal institutions can explain growth internationally across countries. We show that different institutional patterns explain growth across the Paradox states and non-Paradox states.

The objective of this study is to explore the accounting research network among institutions and countries globally and to contribute to the knowledge development in accounting discipline across regions with a novel and original approach.

This study has been conducted by manually collecting data from 10,863 papers published in 22 accounting journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) for the period 2000–2016. Analyses and visualizations of collaborative networks across institutions and regions were performed by using network analysis software packages, including Pajek, UCINET 6, NetDraw and VOSviewer.

The study finds that the most productive five universities are the University of New South Wales, University of Sydney, University of Texas, University of California and University of Manchester worldwide. In accordance with the institution ranking, the five most productive countries in all periods are the USA, the UK, Australia, Spain and Canada. However, in addition to these countries, it is important to note that some European and Asian countries and New Zealand from Oceania are among the most productive countries which host prolific institutions. Furthermore, network indicators show that the UK is the most influential actor in centrality and brokerage within the research network. We should note that Australia is also among the most influential nations with its influential institutions. In all research metrics, the dominance of Anglophone countries (e.g. the USA, the UK and Australia) is observable on which language advantage might play a role since most internationally accredited journals publish scientific articles in English.

The study is bounded with several main limitations. First, due to collecting the data manually, there might be some inherent limitations. Second, the study is constrained by the time frame between 2000 and 2016. The study does not answer why and how questions in investigating research productivity and effectiveness in the network. Our study might inspire new studies to complement ours by considering these constraints.

Our findings indicated the prominent institution-wide and country-wide actors; thus, the results provide a global perspective on the collaboration network. Second, our findings guide job seekers, who are particularly research-oriented, to potential recruiters around the world both at the institution level and country level. Third, the results might play an important role in forming institution-based and country-based research policies. The USA, among others, is a particularly important actor in productivity, whereas the UK, among others, is a remarkable country in centrality and brokerage in the research network. By examining the policies of these two countries, other nations might shape their research strategies, promotion policies and support and reward schemes. Fourth, cross-institution and in particular cross-country collaborations are imperative in the diversity of accounting research as they blend culturally diverse researchers. Fifth, prominent institutions highlighted in this study might be adopted as role models by other institutions in the same country and benefit their expertise in productivity and cooperation by scrutinizing their approaches. Sixth, our findings and metrics might be adopted as benchmarks for institutions and nations for performance evaluation. Considering our 5-year period indicators, institutions can set targets for their improvement and for measuring the progress. We provide other important implications in the conclusion section of the study.

To the best knowledge of the authors, no study yet investigated the collaboration across academic institutions, regions, and countries in accounting discipline to this extent. Therefore, our research provides a significant contribution to the literature by seeking a comprehensive network analysis of authorship patterns from an institutional and geographical perspective. Doing so, we contribute to knowledge development in accounting discipline with institutional and geographical network analyses.

This paper aims to study whether the adoption of an entry mode that fits the social trust level contributes to the improvement of foreign subsidiary performance.

The authors used the Probit model, linear regression, strategic fit approach and instrumental variable regression. The sample was made up of 11,095 observations of Chinese multinational enterprises' foreign subsidiaries in 54 countries from 2005 to 2020.

The results suggest that a host country with a high level of social trust results in fewer difficulties for enterprises in gaining legitimacy, thus foreign subsidiaries are more likely to select the wholly owned entry mode. The results also show that the effect is contingent on the formal institutions of host countries. The results of the mechanism test suggest that social trust influences subsidiaries' entry mode choice by reducing information asymmetry, costs and uncertainty risks. This study further finds that selecting a fit entry mode based on social trust level substantially increases foreign subsidiary performance and this effect is more significant when multinational enterprises (MNEs) are state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

The main limitation of this paper is its only focus on foreign subsidiaries of Chinese MNEs, which may limit the generalizability of research findings.

This paper responds to the call for conducting more research on informal institutions. Findings highlight the critical role of informal institutions in helping foreign subsidiaries in gaining legitimacy in host countries and the essentialness of selecting a fit entry mode based on the informal institutions of host countries for the development of foreign subsidiaries.