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This paper develops an integrative organizational economics framework explaining and predicting multinational firms' managerial resource deployments based on resource-based, agency, and transaction costs theories. Our empirical findings suggest that the governance decision for managerial services of multinational firms is influenced not only by the comparative capabilities of managers, but also by the economic costs to the firm of influencing the behaviours of managers through managerial contracting.

Outward FDI strategies are driven by firms' resource endowments, which in turn are conditioned by their home environment. In emerging economies, thus, the pattern of outward FDI is shaped by local firms' idiosyncratic contexts and the resources that these firms developed to fit the contexts. This includes business groups, a dominant organizational form in many emerging economies, competing with context-bound resources. When they wish to transcend their home context, they need internationally valuable resources, especially managerial resources, which may be quite different than the resources that enable domestic growth. This paper thus explores what resources drive this international growth in the case of Taiwanese business groups. Starting from Penrosian Theory, we focus on managerial resources that are shared across the member firms of a group, and thus shape the profile of the group. We find that international work experience favors internationalization while international education does not. Moreover, domestic institutional resources distract from internationalization, presumably because they are not transferable into other institutional contexts, and thus favor other types of growth.

Foreign investors access local knowledge by co-locating with other foreign direct investment (FDI) firms. However, different aspects of local knowledge can be obtained from different local businesses. Thus, some foreign investors co-locate with FDI firms from the same country of origin, while others co-locate with foreign industry peers. We argue that, relative to industry FDI agglomeration, country-of-origin agglomeration provides an effective channel for the sharing of sensitive and tacit knowledge about local business environments. Therefore, foreign investors in need of such local knowledge are more likely to locate in country-of-origin agglomerations.Empirical evidence based on FDI in Vietnam indicates that foreign investors who perceive local institutions as particularly weak and those with a high degree of outsidership in the local environment are more likely to seek country-of-origin agglomerations than industry FDI agglomerations.

Penrose (1959) theoretically developed the research proposition that the finite capacities of a firm's internally experienced managers limit the rate at which the firm can grow in a given period of time. One empirical implication that follows logically from this line of reasoning is that a fast-growing firm will eventually slow down its growth in the subsequent time period because its firm-specific management team, which is posited to be inelastic at least in the short run, is unable to handle effectively the increased demands that are placed on these internally experienced managers due to increased complexity as well as the time and attention that the new managers require from these internally experienced managers. Consequently, inefficiency in the firm's current operations will follow if the firm maintains its high rate of growth. The research proposition that a firm cannot remain operationally effective if it maintains high rates of growth in successive time periods, and that consequently those firms with foresight typically will slow down their growth in the subsequent time period is known as the 'Penrose effect' in the research literature, and this effect of dynamic adjustment costs has been examined and corroborated in a few empirical research studies. However, researchers have not yet examined the Penrose effect in an international business context.The current paper examines the Penrose effect in an international business context by exploring under what conditions Japanese firms achieve high growth in consecutive time periods in the entered US industries. The empirical results indicate that, consistent with Penrose's (1959) resource-based theory prediction, Japanese multinational firms that entered in US industries where the extent of knowledge tacitness, globalization, and unionization was high, rapid expansion growth in one time period had negative impacts on growth in the subsequent time period. Thus, dynamic adjustment costs limit the rate of the growth of the firm and the development of dynamic capabilities in this international business context, which suggests that the Penrose effect may be widely applicable to international business and corporate strategy. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. INTRODUCTIONHow a firm evolves over time has been an important issue in the fields of strategic management and industrial organization economics (Kor and Mahoney, 2000;Nelson and Winter, 1982). Looking at the historical business record from an organizational capabilities and technology trajectories perspective, Chandler (1990) suggests that modern business enterprises arise from the economies of scale and scope that are made possible by the development of new technologies. Furthermore, a number of researchers who approach these business issues more deductively in economic *Correspondence to: Department of Business Administration, College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. E-mail: josephm@uiuc.edu science come to a similar conclusion to Chandler's (1990) more inductive business h...