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This paper examines the relationship between international diversification and performance by matching a sample of 400 U.S. and 400 Korean firms on industry type and testing the relationship over five years (1992–1996). Results indicate that U.S. firms show a positive association with regard to international diversification and performance, but a negative relationship between product diversification and performance. Korean firms, however, show a positive association with both types of diversification. In addition, Korean firms' strategies were associated more with sales‐based measures, while U.S. firms were associated more closely with profit‐based measures. These results suggest that the two countries do not approach diversification in the same way.

In this paper, we argue that the effect of diversification on performance is not homogeneous across industries, as previously assumed in the literature on diversification in strategy and finance. We provide empirical evidence that some industries are more friendly environments for diversified firms than for specialists, and vice versa. The implications of this qualification for the diversification‐performance relationship are investigated in this study. The results show that the number of specialists in an industry is an important moderator of the diversification‐performance relationship, and it determines the existence of a positive, negative, or curvilinear relationship. Diversification has a more negative impact on performance as the number of specialized firms in the industries in the sample increases. Although we find clear evidence of the curvilinear relationship between diversification and performance frequently found in strategy research, the relationship seems to be the result of not accounting for the relative dominance of diversifiers versus specialists in the industries in the sample.

Although technological diversification is often understood as an explorative activity, the authors argue that it can also be explained as exploitation. The purpose of this paper is to examine how exploitative technological diversification (ETD) affects firm performance and what factors may moderate this relationship.

The sample consists of 1,569 Chinese listed firms with 7,555 observations from 2003 to 2014. Patent data were collected from the State Intellectual Property Office, while financial information was collected from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research database. The system generalised method of moments model was used for testing the hypotheses.

The empirical findings indicate that the relationship between ETD and firm performance is inversely U-shaped. Moreover, this relationship is negatively moderated by environmental munificence, which refers to the availability of resources in the environment where the firm operates, and positively moderated by environmental dynamism, which refers to the extent of volatility and unpredictable change in firms’ external environments.

Overlooking ETD limits applications of diversification logic and the precision of their predictions. This paper tries to fill this gap by empirically testing the relationship between ETD and financial performance.

The authors meta-analyze research on the diversification–performance relationship to empirically establish the impact of home-country formal institutional quality on this relationship. Prior research assumes that a country’s formal institutional quality negatively affects the diversification–performance relationship, especially when it involves unrelated diversification. However, empirical evidence for these propositions is inconclusive because existing studies consider blocks of countries with limited institutional heterogeneity. To provide more clarity, this study aims to consider the diversification–performance relationship across developed, emerging and developing countries.

The meta-analysis relies on a sample of 293 effect sizes of the diversification–performance relationship from 76 primary studies across 15 countries between 1988 and 2019. The sample excludes effects sizes from papers that consider both product and international diversification to control for complex interactions between the strategies, as well as papers that did not consider both related and unrelated diversification.

The results confirm that stronger home-country formal institutions weaken the diversification–performance relationship by decreasing the relative efficiency of internal markets versus external ones. Further, the effect is less negative for related diversification because this strategy can better exploit market frictions in countries with stronger formal institutions and more efficient external markets than its unrelated counterpart.

The study contributes to the literatures on the diversification–performance relationship and home-country governance by providing robust evidence for how formal institutional quality impacts the efficacy of related and unrelated diversification.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships among choice of industry diversification, capabilities and business group performance, as well as to point out the potential concern about endogenous role of industry diversification.

Using data from the top 100 business groups in Taiwan from TEJ database. This study uses Heckman’s two-step estimation procedure and contingency model to achieve unbiased results and examine our hypotheses.

The results of this study find that if business groups’ marketing or operational capabilities are strong they should adopt a high level of diversification strategy and if business groups’ R&D capability is strong they should adopt a low level one. The results of this study also show that the endogenous problem of industry diversification exists, and needs to be considered. Moreover, our finding confirms the importance of capability–strategy fit, which, in turn, can achieve better performance.

On average, high industry diversification groups perform better than low industry diversification groups after controlling for endogeneity issues. Business groups can achieve better performance if their strategy choices match the capabilities they encounter. Managers should pay attention to strategy-capability fit issues. Specifically, they should review their organizational capabilities as well as check their strategies within firms.

This study is one of the first that attempts to explore the endogenous role of diversification strategy choices, and empirical examine strategy-capability fit on business group performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of product and geographic diversification on the performance of Italian manufacturing firms and evaluate the moderating role of family involvement.

The hypotheses have been tested by using a fixed-effects panel data regression model.

Results show a linear relationship between product diversification and firm performance and an inverted U-shaped relationship between geographic diversification and firm performance. Moreover, when considering the status of the family firm, family ties have a negative moderating role on the performance of companies that are product and internationally diversified.

By providing theoretical explanations and empirical evidence, the study extends the diversification-performance research by testing this relationship in an unexplored context (i.e. Italy), and by identifying a still not well explored contingency factor (i.e. family involvement). In doing so, diversification and family involvement literatures are brought together and the results show the importance of the type of owner regarding the impact of product and international diversification on firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the causal relationship between extent of diversification and performance among Indian companies. The key issue is to find out whether diversification provides irresistible opportunities to increase firm performance or is it the superior profitability that motivates management to diversify.

Product diversification is calculated by using Entropy index measure. To measure joint endogeneity of corporate diversification and firm performance, both variables are treated as endogenous in a simultaneous equation model.

The results report that the association between diversification and performance turn strongly significant and positive after controlling the issue of endogeneity. The study finds a strong two-way relationship between extent of diversification and firm performance. As indicated by the results, the extent of diversification is positively related to performance, thereby implying that diversified firms experience a significant diversification premium. The study also demonstrates a positive relation of performance and total diversification indicating that good performance leads to greater diversification.

Certain variables such as R&D intensity, export intensity and risk could not be included in the analysis for want of data. Inclusion of these independent variables could have strengthened the model and its implications.

The results strongly implicate/recommend the managers of developing countries to adopt the strategy of diversification to overcome institutional inefficiencies prevailing in their domicile environment. Corporate heads must also capture the correct timings/dynamism in environment before pursuing diversification as a strategy of growth. There exists causality between diversification and performance; hence, profitable firms should capitalize synergetic effects of diversification strategy and use it as a medium of growth.

There was hardly any literature available on causal relationship between diversification and performance with respect to emerging countries. There was even a wider gap specifically in relation to India where none of the researchers has so far studied causality between diversification and performance controlling endogeneity.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between geographical diversification and the underwriting performance for the world's largest reinsurance groups. It also aims to verify that the form and nature of the relationship between diversification and performance follow an S‐shaped curve with increased diversification of the largest reinsurance groups.

Analysis in the paper is based on the concept of Geographical Spread Index defined and calculated by UNCTAD. Data on largest reinsurance groups in the world are published annually by Standard & Poor's for only a limited number of reinsurance groups. To overcome the small sample problem, a re‐sampling procedure from the original sample, similar to a bootstrap sample, is used to validate the results.

The results show that, overall, international geographical diversification has a positive effect on a reinsurance firm's underwriting performance but that this relationship is not linear. It rather follows an S‐shaped curve. Although data limitation does not allow more sophisticated investigations, the results reported in this paper are nevertheless significant. It seems that at an early stage of expansion in proximate markets there are efficiency gains for the firm. With increased internationalization there may be a diminution in performance because of higher transaction costs or learning costs for new markets. Further expansion in foreign markets brings back efficiency and higher performance.

Only cross‐section data for a small sample of companies are available and therefore it is not possible to analyze the dynamics of geographical diversification. A firm may deliberately expand for long‐term strategy reasons such as market share even though this is detrimental to medium‐run performance. Also, the analysis cannot provide any answer to the existence or not of a maximum level of international diversification beyond which performance would decline.

In the literature on firm diversification in the financial services sector, product diversification and performance has received significant attention with mixed results but except for a few papers, the internationalization aspect has not been examined. The reinsurance sector is important since reinsurance activities are, by nature, more geographically diversified than other financial activities. Furthermore, the largest European reinsurance groups dominate this worldwide market and many reinsurance companies have, in the past decade, increased their foreign direct investment and acquired other companies in part because of the belief that only very large players will have the cost advantages necessary to remain competitive in global markets.

Corporate diversification is a strategy that enables corporations to expand their core business into other businesses. In Malaysia, corporate diversification continues to represent a fundamental organizational structure. Some two-thirds of Malaysian firms are diversified. However, when compared to developed countries such as the US and the UK, we find that firms are moving toward non-diversification. The study is based on the population framework consisting of all of the public limited companies (PLCs) listed on the Bursa Malaysia stock exchange from 2007 to 2012. A dynamic panel model system generalized method of moments (GMM) was used to analyze the diversification and firm’s performance theories.

The empirical findings demonstrated that diversification is better than non-diversification firms for the curvilinear relationship between diversification and firm’s performance (ROA and Tobin-Q) when using the entropy index and relatedness is taken into consideration. The research further concluded that related and unrelated diversification also has a positive relationship with performance, but diversification must be the dominant (focused) and cannot be too broad in nature. Diversification that is too broad may cause a positive relationship to turn in to a negative relationship toward performance in both related and unrelated instances of diversification.

The relationship between diversification and organizational performance has been the subject of numerous studies over the years (Palepu, 1985; Rumelt, 1974). However, strategy scholars have universally defined diversification using a narrow definition, namely that corporate diversification is a function or reflection of the number of products/businesses in a firm's portfolio. The present study argues that such a definition has become outdated given the impact of international market diversification (Kim, Hwang, & Burgers, 1989; Rugman, 1979). Integrating these two views of corporate diversification, we investigate diversification‐performance differences using market‐ and product‐based measures of diversification and an international sample. Results suggest that the traditional model of diversification may not be applicable to all countries and that international differences exist.