Journal of International Business Studies – Volume 49(5), 575-604
Cross-border venture capital investments: The impact of foreignness on returns
Axel Buchner, Susanne Espenlaub, Arif Khurshed, Abdulkadir Mohamed
Against the background of the growing internationalization of venture capital (VC) investing, this is the first global comparison of the returns generated by individual domestic and cross-border deals. We examine investments worldwide during 1971–2009 and find that cross-border investments significantly underperform compared with equivalent domestic investments. Returns are negatively affected by geographic distances, cultural disparities, and institutional differences between the home and host countries. Returns on cross-border and domestic deals also decline after the late 1990s. International portfolio diversification and the saturation of domestic markets may explain why VC investors make cross-border investments despite poor expected returns.
Multinational Business Review – Volume 26 (2), pg 111-125
Corruption, political discretion and entrepreneurship
Alfredo Jiménez, Ilan Alon,
While common sense suggests that corruption will likely have a negative impact on the economy as it raises the cost of doing business, research on the topic showed inconsistent results (positive, negative and neutral). This paper aims to verify whether corruption has a “grease” or “sand” effect on the wheels of entrepreneurial rates and under which conditions corruption will have stronger or weaker effects. Using institutional theory as the basis for the hypotheses, generalized least squares estimation is conducted to empirically examine the role of corruption and political discretion in entrepreneurship in a sample of 93 countries. Countries with higher levels of corruption are associated with lower levels of firm creation. However, this negative effect of corruption is weaker when there are higher levels of political discretion. This is the first evaluation of the moderating effect of political discretion on the negative impact of corruption on entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship & Regional Development – Volume 30(5-6), pg 562-584
Network embeddedness in the internationalization of biotechnology entrepreneurs
Tanja Leppäaho, Sylvie Chetty, Pavlos Dimitratos
This study investigates how entrepreneurs of biotech enterprises embed in domestic and international networks so as to internationalize. We advance a contextual framework of embeddedness of internationalizing entrepreneurs, providing a contribution (i) by synthesizing and applying existing conceptual insights from the networking literature to provide a more culturally sensitive view of getting embedded for international entrepreneurship in the biotech industry and (ii) by adding insights into the practices and (micro)processes of how and in what ways embeddedness integrates with the internationalization of biotech entrepreneurs. Our study involves six entrepreneurs from Canada, Finland, and New Zealand. Context-specific embeddedness was studied by exploring the (i) type, (ii) strength, (iii) locality, and (iv) importance of the international and national network ties among internationalizing entrepreneurs. We found differences in relation to the locality of universities and research institutes, role and type of financiers, and customer focus in internationalization. For instance, while customers were central to the embeddedness of Canadian and New Zealand entrepreneurs, Finnish entrepreneurs had no focus on their customers, but acted solely through sales channels and partners. The customer focus of New Zealand entrepreneurs was mainly international, whereas it was domestic in the case of Canadian entrepreneurs.