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Extending the springboard perspective with the resource dependence theory, the authors posit that cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are a new channel for emerging economy firms (EEFs) to enhance their technology capabilities. This study aims to examine the impact of cross-border M&As initiated by EEFs on their technology augmentation vis-à-vis matched domestic M&A cases and investigate the factors influencing the difference in post-merger innovation capability.

This paper estimates the post-acquisition innovation capability of acquirers from emerging economies (EEs) that engage in cross-border M&As. To remove possible selection bias, the authors leverage a difference-in-difference-style approach in combination with a matched sample constructed by pairing each cross-border M&A case with a similar domestic deal. The data set contains 266 cross-border M&As and 266 matched domestic M&A deals between 2003 and 2011, whereby acquirers are based in 6 EEs and targets are in 36 countries consisting of both EEs and advanced economies (AEs).

The present empirical results show that cross-border M&As engaged by EEFs are an important engine for improving EEFs’ innovation capability through technology augmentation. The main empirical results are as follows. First, compared with matched domestic acquirers with similar characteristics, EE cross-border M&As have a positive effect on innovation capability. Second, the positive effect of the EEFs’ cross-border M&As relative to the matched domestic M&As on innovation capability is driven largely by cross-border M&As with targets in AEs. Third, the increase in post-M&A innovation capability of the EE cross-border acquirers comes mainly from deals where targets are based in countries with relatively superior human capital and innovation capability than those of the acquirers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first systematic study of whether cross-border M&As serve as an effective channel of technology augmentation for EE acquirers compared to matched domestic acquirers with similar characteristics.

Using bibliometric techniques, the author analyzes a dataset of 276 articles on cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMAs) published in 13 management and international business journals. The author assesses the scientific impact and visualizes the intellectual landscape of research on CBMAs by analyzing publication and citation data and interconnections between publications. First, the author assesses annual publication trends and identifies highly cited articles and productive journals in the dataset that have significantly contributed to our understanding of CBMAs. Second, the author identifies main themes in recent research on CBMAs by focusing on frequently used keywords in publications. Third, the author identifies clusters of related research and explores their interrelationships to outline emerging trends, new perspectives, and directions for future research on CBMAs. Overall, this chapter contributes to the understanding of CBMAs by documenting the progress made to date and providing important insights for future research.

Emerging market multinationals often face a variety of legitimacy challenges as they engage in cross-border acquisitions in developed countries, which requires an assortment of legitimacy strategies best aligned with the legitimacy challenges they face. This study advocates for a configurational perspective that examines how different configurations of legitimacy challenges, organizational characteristics, and legitimacy strategies influence the likelihood of deal completion in cross-border acquisitions by emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs).

Based on 328 cross-border acquisition cases by Chinese firms, this study adopts the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the combined effects of institutional distance, political affinity, equity sought, architecture design, sensitive·industry and state-owned and enterprise (SOE) on cross-border acquisition completion.

This study identifies six pathways with different configurations for deal completion, suggesting that a deal's overall legitimacy falls at the intersection of the country-level institution and the firm-level characters and strategy evaluations.

This study investigates how nested legitimacy influences cross-border acquisition completion by offering a holistic and configurational understanding of the deal completion of cross-border acquisitions by EMNEs and yields useful insights for future research on cross-border acquisition completion and legitimacy.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cross-border M&A advisory business in Japan.

Using the grounded theory approach and trust embedded in network theory, the authors conducted interviews with 12 Japanese senior M&A advisors from 8 different advisory firms, categorizing the results into three general themes.

The first theme comprises deep insights contributing to a “decrease in M&A deals” during the COVID-19 crisis as not many deals could be advised while several were canceled. The second theme is “time delays,” with ongoing deals taking more time to be completed. The third gen-eral theme concerns the “new normal” after the COVID-19 era, as M&A advisors have learned to cope with their challenges and are subsequently more efficient, especially time-wise, in dealing with clients.

The research was based on qualitative data gathered from only 12 interviewees from 8 different consultancies who were Japanese senior M&A advisors.

The practical implications of this research go beyond the findings of M&A studies conducted during and soon after the COVID-19 pandemic. Consulting firms commonly report on the COVID-19 impact on M&A markets or client firms but are silent about their own hardships in establishing trustful relationships with clients during the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, we turn the spotlight on the consulting firms themselves to understand their challenges.

The originality of this research goes beyond previous studies on the economic impact of firms; the authors lay out the foundation for the hardship of establishing trustful relationships between M&A advisors and their clients during the COVID-19 crisis. The three general themes elucidated the impact of the pandemic, highlighting the challenges confronting the Japanese M&A advisory business. These themes thus provide a more nuanced understanding of the COVID-19 impact.

The study aims to evaluate and compare the mergers and acquisitions (M&As) performance utilising a sample of deals originating from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). In addition to nation-wise performance analysis, a further sub-sample analysis is conducted based on the target location (domestic and cross-border), development status (developed and emerging) and the acquired ownership stakes (majority and minority).

The final sample of the study includes 7,105 deals announced between 2000 and 2019. M&A performance is proxied by the abnormal returns earned over the select event windows. Multiple parametric and non-parametric tests are employed for testing the robustness.

The results indicate significant performance differences across BRICS markets, with the highest and lowest abnormal returns reported for Chinese and Russian acquirers, respectively. The disaggregated analysis also affirms the performance differences for the select sub-samples.

The study highlights the need for acknowledging and expounding the differences in M&As across emerging markets. Further, the results of the study provide a possible explanation of the disagreement over the M&A performance results reported in the previous literature.

Acknowledging and understanding the potential performance differences based on location, ownership strategies and development status can aid executives in sharpening decision-making and also help general investors.

The study contributes by examining a comprehensive sample of deals across five major emerging economies, as against the majority of previous studies which have their results based on either single nation samples or have utilised only a sub-sample of domestic or foreign acquisitions.

Based on organizational learning theory, this study aims to investigate the performance consequences and potential contextual factors of outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) persistence.

A regression analysis was conducted on a sample of 19,950 OFDI events of 1,425 A-share listed Chinese enterprises from 2008 to 2022. The estimator used was ordinary least squares with residual analysis, which allowed us to obtain robust and reliable results.

The results indicated that persistence in both greenfield investments and cross-border M&As had a significant and positive impact on firm performance, and such relationship was positively moderated by organizational absorptive capacity.

This study only tested the economic performance of OFDI persistence rather than innovation and social performance. Exploring the effects of OFDI persistence on other aspects may also add new insights to the persistence literature. Besides absorptive capacity, it might be useful to conduct a more comprehensive consideration of moderators in the future.

This paper contributes to the research on the temporal dimension of internationalization by introducing the concept of OFDI persistence. Additionally, we used the OFDI spell to capture the notion of OFDI persistence, which is an endeavor to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional indicator. Finally, this paper also contributes to the organizational learning perspective by applying it to analyze persistent OFDI operations.

Emerging market firms (EMFs) are increasingly expanding their global presence through cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMAs). While such deals are distinct from those by advanced market firms, there is a need for a comprehensive understanding of how emerging home markets form this distinctiveness. This study aims to remedy this gap.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review of 84 empirical papers. Through a broad search string and seven exclusion criteria, the authors carefully select studies on country-level home factors of CBMAs by EMFs.

After summarizing paper volumes, journals and context factors of home/host countries and industries, the authors highlight different strands of institutional theory as the prevailing perspective and pre-M&A issues as the foremost theme. CBMAs by EMFs are influenced by distinct home-exclusive factors, and the mechanisms linking home-country factors to CBMAs by EMFs show significant inconsistencies across studies.

This review focuses on home country influence and thus goes beyond general characteristics of CBMAs by EMFs. The authors highlight more diverse types of home country factors and CBMA outcomes and, more importantly, take a closer look at involved mechanisms. Doing so, the authors identify gaps and disparities that have limited the understanding of home country influence in CBMAs by EMFs. To correct this, the authors offer a comprehensive roadmap for future research, contributing to EMF studies in particular and CBMA and international business research in general.

This study aims to identify the strategic factors and their effects on the post-cross-border acquisitions (CBA) technological innovation performance of the acquiring firms. It develops a hierarchical model to examine the interrelationship between identified strategic factors such as strategic flexibility, strategic ambidexterity, environmental dynamism, etc.

This study uses modified total interpretive structural modeling qualitative methodology (m-TISM) to develop a hierarchical model and conducts a Matrice d’impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment (MICMAC) analysis to show the interrelationship between strategic factors affects the acquirer’s post-CBA technological innovation performance. It determines the autonomous, dependent, linkage and independent strategic factors. It further uses comparative case analysis to empirically examine the strategic factors in real-time CBA situations.

This study shows the m-TISM-based hierarchical model highlighting the interrelation, level of autonomy, dependence and linkage among strategic factors affecting the acquirer’s post-CBA technological innovation performance. It suggests that strategic factors such as environmental dynamism, R&D competence, innovation capability and technological capability are largely autonomous and have significant driving power, whereas strategic ambidexterity and strategic flexibility are the connecting factors. post-M&A integration is the governing factor for technological innovation performance in CBA.

The strategists and practitioners could evaluate the key strategic factors having significant driving power for strategy formulation and implementing efficient policies. By implementing the m-TISM model acquiring a firm’s post-CBA performance can be enhanced. Future researchers might utilize quantitative methods like regression and structural equation modeling in the CBA context.

This study uses a novel m-TISM and MICMAC approach to identify the driving and dependent factors affecting post-CBA technological innovation performance. It further provides a detailed theoretical and conceptual understanding relating to the philosophy and establishes an interrelation amongst these under-researched strategic factors in CBA.

This study aims to address a significant gap in the literature by exploring the individual nature and microfoundation perspective of cultural friction during the integration phase following cross-border mergers and acquisitions (CBMAs). It focuses on the role of face, a pivotal facet of interactions within Asian organizations, elucidating its importance in post-M&A integration outcomes.

Using a conceptual approach, this study draws on three bodies of literature, namely, cultural friction, microfoundations and face concerns. It reconsiders cultural friction as a microfounded construct and introduces face concerns as a pivotal element to understanding the challenges faced by managers at the forefront of CBMAs involving Asian companies. The conceptual approach is illustrated with examples for the world of practice.

This research makes two significant contributions to the fields of CBMAs and cultural friction. First, it demonstrates the relevance of the concept of cultural friction at the individual level, shedding light on the complex post-CBMA integration process. Second, this study demonstrates the critical role of face concerns in the sociocultural integration following CBMAs. This is underexplored in extant literature.

The crucial role of face is well known to those working in Asia. Yet academic inquiry remains underdeveloped on this issue for CBMAs. The friction derived from face concerns provides additional insights into the nature of the cultural challenges confronting managers during sociocultural integration and elucidates the micro-mechanisms influencing individuals’ responses to cultural friction. This research responds to calls to examine the human side of M&As uncovering previously neglected issues within intercultural managerial encounters.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the target firm’s high-tech status on the share of ownership decision in cross-border acquisitions (CBAs), which is an under-explored topic in cross-border M&A literature.

The authors used Tobit regression and tested the hypotheses using a sample of 7,011 CBA transactions between 1999 and 2014. Inverse Mills ratio was used to address selection bias, and various robustness tests were performed.

The authors found that acquirers seek greater ownership share when acquiring high-tech firms, and that this relationship is moderated by various firm and national level factors. Specifically, the positive relationship between the high-tech status of a target firm and ownership share acquired is stronger when the firms’ primary operations are highly related or there is high formal institutional distance between the firms’ home countries, but it is weaker when acquirers have more prior M&A experience or there is high cultural and geographic distance between the firms’ home countries.

While the topic of ownership strategy in CBAs is advancing, it is still limited, especially when examining acquisitions of high-tech target firms. The authors contribute to the research on CBAs and ownership strategy by focusing on the high-tech status of the target firm, and using a sample of both private and public target firms from 116 countries.