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This study aims to examine the multidimensional nature of institutional distance as a driver of acquisition decisions in emerging markets. Then, this study aims to offer a nuanced perspective on the role of its various formal and informal dimensions by taking into account the potential contingency role played by a firm’s context experience.

Building on institutional economics and organizational institutionalism, this study explores the heterogeneity of institutional distance and its effects on the decision to enter emerging versus advanced markets through cross-border acquisitions. Thus, institutional distance is disentangled into its formal and informal dimensions, the former being captured by regulatory efficiency, country governance and financial development. Furthermore, our framework examines the moderating effect of an acquiring firm’s experience in institutionally similar environments, defined as context experience. The hypotheses are analyzed on a sample of 496 cross-border acquisitions by Italian companies in 41 countries from 2008 to 2018.

Findings indicate that at an increasing distance in terms of regulatory efficiency and financial development, acquiring firms are less likely to enter emerging markets, while informal institutional distance is positively associated with such acquisitions. Context experience mitigates the negative effect of formal distance and enhances the positive effect of informal distance.

This study contributes to institutional distance literature in multiple ways. First, by bridging institutional economics and organizational institutionalism and second, by examining the heterogeneity of formal and informal dimensions of distance, this study offers a finer-grained perspective on how institutional distance affects acquisition decisions. Finally, it offers a contingency perspective on the role of context experience.

This study seeks to explore the relationship between performance relative to aspiration and SMEs' internationalization speed, and moderating effects of top management's policy knowledge and institutional distance between the above relation.

This study tests the authors’ hypotheses using data on Chinese manufacturing SMEs over a 5-year period from 2013 to 2017. The authors leverage archival panel data on publicly listed companies on the SME Board, GEM and New OTC Market in the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges. The authors then collected data from the WIND and ZEPHYR databases.

The results confirm a U-shaped relation between performance relative to aspiration and SMEs' internationalization speed, and show that this relation is steepening by top management's policy knowledge in home country but flattening by institutional distance as environmental dynamics.

The study findings contribute to the international business field by exploring how a firm's risk situation in internationalization can change, thereby influencing SMEs' international expansion.

Foreign construction subsidiaries play an important role in the global construction market. How to establish and maintain long-term sustainable performance has attracted increased attention, but only a few studies have considered this issue. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between autonomy and the sustainable performance of subsidiaries and to provide support for their management control modes.

From an institutional logics perspective, empirical research using a questionnaire survey was conducted following the methodological framework of this study. Relevant data were collected from 106 experienced managers of foreign construction subsidiaries, and the hypotheses were tested through a regression model.

The results show that foreign construction subsidiaries have a high degree of operational autonomy, which tends to strengthen their embeddedness in the host country and improve their sustainable performance. However, the role of strategic autonomy is not found to be significant. The moderation results show that the positive impact between operational autonomy and external network embeddedness is strengthened by institutional distance. Institutional distance has no significant moderating impact on the relationship between strategic autonomy and external network embeddedness, respectively.

Geographical limitations may exist as the survey is focused on the Chinese construction foreign subsidiaries. However, based on an institutional logics perspective, this study discusses the management control mode of foreign subsidiaries, which enriches the antecedents of sustainable performance and can provide an in-depth explanation of the effects of the organizational strategies of multinational construction enterprises.

This study provides beneficial information for the sustainable performance of foreign construction subsidiaries. It will provide detailed guidance to managers located in different institutional environments on optimally promoting the sustainable development of subsidiaries.

This study identifies autonomy as an important antecedent, making it one of the first studies investigating autonomy on the sustainable performance of foreign construction subsidiaries. The findings of this study can contribute to the construction subsidiaries' sustainable performance literature and provide novel, comprehensive knowledge for academia and practice.

Drawn from the push–pull perspective, this research aims to identify the determinants of Chinese technology's outward foreign direct investments (OFDI) into the Eurasian region.

The authors argue that contrary to the extant literature, technology-driven OFDI from emerging-market multinationals (EMNEs) do not always seek developed countries, and EMNEs' technology investments in emerging economies are rising indicating that there are factors in these economies that can prove attractive. The authors recognize the influence of the macroeconomic environment and the interaction of home and host-country institutional contexts that influence the location choice of EMNEs technology-driven OFDI into other emerging economies, mediated by the industry sector and firm's ownership structure. The authors test our hypotheses using a sample of 1,656 observations of Chinese MNEs' tech-investments in the Eurasian region from 2005 to 2019.

The study results indicate that bilateral diplomatic relations pave the way of the host-country institutional environment for Chinese MNEs uncovering the role of the Chinese government as an OFDI facilitator. This study also unveils a lower technology level of the Chinese MNEs' investments in the Eurasian region connoting an interest in market opportunities exploitation through their existing technologies – through its comparative advantage in the global markets – rather than strategic assets acquisition aiming at augmenting their technological capabilities. This trend is similar to that of other major foreign direct investment (FDI) source countries.

This research contributes to a better understanding of the characteristics and the location choice of technology investments from EMNEs into other emerging economies that have received scant attention in the literature. In addition, it extends the institutional theory by analyzing how home-country institutions, through bilateral diplomatic relations, may smooth the host country institutional environment for home-country MNEs' foreign investments and contributes as well to the debate on the applicability of the existing theoretical framework in the case of emerging-market MNEs.

This study reviews the literature on institutional theory in international business and examines the institutional factors behind the success or failure of multinational corporations (MNCs) in emerging markets.

This systematic literature review analysed 116 peer-reviewed articles published in leading journals between 2005 and 2022. The R package Bibliometrix and VOSviewer visualization software were used for analysis. A hybrid methodology combining bibliometric and content analyses was utilized to obtain a descriptive evaluation of the publication impact along with a keyword co-occurrence map, context-specific institutional effects and subsidiary strategies.

The Journal of International Business Studies, along with influential authors such as Mike W. Peng, Klaus Meyer, and Mehmet Demirbag, have taken the lead in advancing institutional theories for MNC internationalization in emerging markets. The clusters from the co-word analysis revealed dominant MNC entry modes, institutional distances and MNC localization strategies. The content analysis highlights how the institutional environment is operationalized across the macro-, micro- and meso-institutional contexts and how the MNC subsidiary responds in emerging markets. Meso-level interactions emphasize the relational aspects of business strategies in emerging markets.

Contextualizing subsidiary strategies and institutional forms can help managers align their strategic responses to the dynamic relationship between subsidiaries and the institutional environment. The review findings will enable policymakers to simplify regulatory policies and encourage MNC subsidiary networks with local stakeholders in emerging markets.

Legitimacy strategies such as corporate community involvement in emerging markets are crucial for enhancing societal support and removing stakeholders' scepticism for MNC business operations in emerging markets. Moral legitimacy should be implemented by managers, such as lending support to disaster management efforts and humanitarian crises, as they expand to new business environments of emerging markets.

This study is the first to explore institutional diversity and subsidiary strategic responses in a three-layered institutional context. The findings highlight the relevance of contextualizing institutional perspectives for international business scholars and practitioners as they help build context-specific theoretical frameworks and business strategies. Future research recommendations are suggested in the macro-, micro- and meso-institutional contexts.

This study seeks to explicate how institutional disruptions impact multinational corporation (MNC) subsidiary control choices. It uses institutional theory to understand the influence of formal and informal institutions across countries on the type of control system employed in an MNC manufacturing subsidiary.

This study’s sample is based on a unique dataset from five trustworthy sources. We use multi-level models to account for the hierarchical nature of the sample of 1,630 multinational subsidiaries spread across 26 host countries by firms from 21 home countries.

The institutional distance between the host and the home country has a negative relationship with strategic control. In contrast, the home country’s power distance has a positive relationship with strategic control.

Study findings indicate the need to incorporate formal and informal institutional elements in the control system’s conceptual framing and design. This notion complements existing visualizations of optimizing MNC controls through extant articulations of minimizing governance costs through organizational design choices or strategic needs.

The existing research on institutional distance implicitly posits the monotonic effect of contextual differences on the multinational enterprise (MNE) behaviors (e.g. entry mode, research and development (R&D) investment and subsidiary reverse knowledge transfer). Namely, MNEs from the same home to the same host countries are thought to have homogenous perceptions on the institutional influences and thus behave similarly. However, the authors argue that MNEs, due to their different performance aspirations in host countries, will have heterogenous perceptions on such contextual influences and thereafter behave differently.

Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm and employing a unique sample comprised of 140 Chinese MNEs' foreign direct investments (FDIs) in Taiwan in 2017, the authors developed and tested the hypotheses.

The authors found that the emerging-market MNEs' (EMNEs’) perceptions of higher local institutional difficulties will be strengthened when their local performances are below their aspiration levels, making them more risk-taking. Nevertheless, EMNEs' local experiences and local equity-based partnerships will mitigate such negative perceptions, mitigating their risk-taking orientation.

The empirical findings make contributes to the international business (IB) literature by extending knowledge on the determinants and conditions of the heterogeneity in EMNEs' behavioral orientations when in face of the same institutional distance. The authors also provide managerial implications by showing that EMNEs' firm-specific resources (i.e. local experience and local equity-based partnership) will alter their perceptions of local institutional difficulties, leading to different behavioral orientations.

The rise of emerging economies in the innovation landscape has often been attributed to the positive spillovers of innovation capabilities from multinational corporations (MNCs). However, it is less certain that their innovative capabilities imported from the home country function effectively in the host country from the outset. This study examines the performance of the innovation capabilities of MNC subsidiaries in emerging economies over time by considering the gradual process of their learning about host countries.

We employed stochastic frontier analysis to measure innovation capabilities, our focal construct. For regression analysis, we applied the Mundlak estimator, a variant of the fixed-effects panel estimator, to a sample comprising subsidiaries of MNCs from technologically advanced nations operating in Korea between 2006 and 2016.

Our results indicate that the innovation capabilities of MNC subsidiaries initially underperform those of local firms but improve over time, eventually surpassing the capabilities of their local counterparts. Furthermore, our findings reveal that institutional distance amplifies the underperformance of the innovation capabilities of MNC subsidiaries.

This study contributes to the literature by extending both theoretical development and empirical measurement of innovation capabilities in cross-national settings. Additionally, it deepens our understanding of whether and how MNC subsidiaries adapt their innovation capabilities to the local market environment.

This paper aims to explore how the establishment modes used by emerging economy multinational corporations (EE-MNCs) influence their subsequent experiences of liability of origin (LOO) in developed economies based on the causal-model theory of categorization.

Taking Chinese listed firms' direct investments in developed economies as the sample, this paper utilizes Heckman (1979)'s self-selection model to examine the effect of establishment modes. Besides, when checking the robustness, subsample analyses and 2SLS regressions are used to rule out the alternative explanation associated with LOO mitigation.

EE-MNCs that enter a developed economy by greenfield investment experience heightened LOO while entries using M&A are associated with the mitigated liability. When EEMNCs enter a more institutionally distant developed country, the establishment modes will be more determinant of their subsequent experiences of this liability. Moreover, the effect of establishment modes can recede when EE-MNCs have established their presence in a developed country for a longer time.

This paper utilizes the causal-model theory of categorization to articulate the underlying mechanisms through which the country-of-origin cue is weakened by the cue transmitted by M&A. It further considers the context-saliency of the cue of M&A and clarifies boundary conditions for the effectiveness of this establishment mode to mitigate LOO.

Given their interrelationship, international market selection (IMS) and entry mode selection (EMS) must be considered jointly if an optimal entry strategy is to be realized. However, researchers in the field of international construction have the tendency to consider IMS and EMS independently or sequentially. Therefore, this paper aims to explore a holistic framework that can accommodate IMS and EMS concurrently and test it using empirical data.

his study includes theoretical and empirical research. In theoretical part, an integrated decision model of IMS and EMS is proposed adopting literature review and theoretical derivation, then hypotheses are developed for the impact of decision-making factors. In the latter part, the IMS and EMS of 54 Chinese contractors in 67 countries were investigated, empirical data are collected according to hypotheses, an ordinal logistic regression model is established for statistics analysis. Finally, findings are drawn by comparing literature-based hypotheses with data-based analysis results.

Results show that empirical data fit theoretical model well. Findings are: IMS and EMS can be integrated into a holistic decision-making framework when be properly sequenced. When IMS and EMS are determined simultaneously, the decision can benefit from a sharing of common information. And the roles of at least 13 common factors are empirically demonstrated in this study.

The integrated decision sequence proposed in this study is applicable for a specific market, and cannot compare multiple alternative markets directly. The decision-making factors identified in this paper do not cover the enterprise strategic objectives and some other factors. Empirical data and some theoretical assumptions are based on the international market entry strategy of Chinese contractors. Therefore, the conclusions may not be completely applicable to global contractors though have certain reference value.

Based on the idea of holistic decision-making of IMS and EMS, this study proposes an international market entry strategy (IMES) sequence and an explicit model for determinants, then tests them with empirical data. This paper provides a new idea to manage IMS and EMS concurrently, which can improve the efficiency of IMES decision-making and avoid missing optimal alternatives. This study paves the way for a practical model and provides reference for contractors' international market entry strategy.