The institution-based view of strategy has emerged as a leading perspective in Strategic Management. It incorporates the institutional dimension when offering relevant answers to the fundamental questions of strategy. One of the challenges of this perspective is to develop stronger measures of institutions (Peng et al., 2009). This paper seeks to contribute in this direction by offering a detailed analysis of the main measures of institutions that previous works in Strategic Management have used. Our aim is to offer a guide that will help researchers to decide how they should incorporate the institutional dimension into their empirical work.

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This paper analyzes the impact of adopting the ISO 14001 standard on firm environmental and economic performance. In particular, it is argued that the degree of environmental awareness of the society (EAS) and firm size are two factors moderating the effect of ISO 14001 on firm performance. A number of hypotheses are formulated and empirically tested on an international sample of 583 listed companies in 46 countries over the period of 2009–2018. The findings show that (i) ISO 14001 adoption contributes to reducing firm carbon emission intensity and increasing firm profitability; (ii) the impact of ISO14001 on profitability is greater for companies from countries with high EAS and for larger firms; and (iii) the impact of ISO 14001 on carbon intensity is greater for headquartered in countries with low EAS. Managerial and policy implications resulting from the widespread adoption of certifiable environmental standards are also discussed.

The organizational structure of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is mainly made up of subsidiaries located in emerging and advanced countries. Consequently, they usually compete against the same rivals simultaneously in both emerging and advanced contexts. Multimarket contact (MMC) theory analyzes the competitive dynamics that arise in these situations. However, researchers have paid more attention to the consequences of multimarket contact in developed countries than to its effect in emerging countries. To explore the impact of the macroenvironment on the relationship between MMC and performance, we examine how coinciding with multimarket rivals in emerging economies alters the effect of MMC on firm performance. Our research, which is developed with a sample from the mobile telecommunications industry, shows that the presence of MNEs in emerging countries hinders the development of mutual forbearance practices and, therefore, reduces the positive effect of MMC on firm performance.

Multimarket competition theory states that if two firms coincide in multiple markets, the level of rivalry between them changes, which, in turn, affects their performance. This article extends this perspective in two ways. We first propose that multimarket competition affects not only the rivalry levels of multimarket rivals but also the rivalry experienced by the other firms present in the markets in which these multimarket rivals operate. We refer to these indirect effects as multimarket competition spillovers, and we propose that they affect firm performance. Second, we conjecture that multimarket competition spillovers are more intense when the firm that creates the spillover and the one that receives it belong to the same strategic group. Our analyses of the Spanish retail banking sector show that the performance of firms is significantly affected by the multimarket competition spillovers of rivals that belong to the same strategic group.