Does Internationalization of Business-Group-Affiliated Firms Depend on Their Performance?

Abstract

Previous research on international operations of the business groups (BG) have predominantly looked into the effects of internationalization on various frontiers of business. Pertaining to emerging economies, the implicit assumption is internationalization helps to avert the uncertainties of market imperfections. We raise doubt on the implicit assumption that just being affiliated to a parent firm will provide the resources for internationalization. Therefore, we have taken up this study, to understand the dynamics of emerging economy multinationals, which are characterized by their asset seeking nature to internationalize. We have tested our hypotheses on listed Indian firms. We have selected top 499 BSE listed companies, which had reported the highest amount of sales in 2010 as the base, and we generated a balanced panel dataset of 2994 firm years using the observations for the period 2010-2015. We used General Linear Square (GLS) fixed effects model to examine the impact of performance of BG affiliated firms on their degree of internationalization. We expected a positive relationship between firm performance and degree of internationalization, which was further anticipated to be positively moderated by business group affiliation of firms.