Globalization

The rise of low-cost artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offers significant potential for businesses globally, yet AI adoption remains uneven. What shapes this unequal adoption? While prior work attributes adoption patterns to demand-side factors including physical costs and complementary assets, we theorize that AI entrepreneurs' strategic choice to target specific markets creates both search and perceived-fit frictions for firms outside of those markets.

Multinational enterprises are at the centre of policy debates in low- and middle-income countries. As some of the most productive and innovative firms in the world, which are at the core of global supply chains, multinational enterprises (MNEs) can accelerate development in the countries hosting them, both directly with their presence, and indirectly through linkages to local economic actors.

Multinational enterprises are at the centre of policy debates in low- and middle-income countries. As some of the most productive and innovative firms in the world, which are at the core of global supply chains, multinational enterprises (MNEs) can accelerate development in the countries hosting them, both directly with their presence, and indirectly through linkages to local economic actors.

Why do startups from mid-sized markets struggle to scale? We theorize that their home market is big enough to gain early traction, which incentivizes them to delay targeting new markets necessary for growth. This delay, however, allows adaptation costs to grow too large. We test this by exploring international expansions using interview and large-scale website language data of up to 20,000 software startups from around the world.

We present a dynamic two-country model in which military spending, geopolitical risk, and government bond prices are jointly determined. The model is consistent with three empirical facts: hegemons have a funding advantage, this advantage rises with geopolitical tensions, and war losers suffer from higher debt devaluation than victors.

Firms with political connections to a regime with an authoritarian history face a dilemma when the regime undergoes a democratic transition. Such connections provide an essential competitive advantage when the regime is in power but become a liability when an institutional transition brings democratic change. This study theorizes that when mass protests expose a regime’s distorted policies favoring elites over others and signal a high probability of regime turnover, firms may hedge against the risks associated with their political connections by engaging in philanthropy.

With multinational corporations (MNCs) increasingly taking public stances on sociopolitical issues such as immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and racism, it is imperative that International Business (IB) research keeps pace with normative societal debates. In this paper, we introduce the concept of corporate sociopolitical activism (SPA) to the IB literature and develop theory on why MNCs consistently or inconsistently engage in SPA in response to the same issue in their home country and a host country.