Resource availability, international acquisition experience, and cross-border M&A target search
研究资源可用性如何影响企业跨境并购目标的地理和制度距离，并发现企业先前的国际并购经验会强化这种关系，对跨国战略决策有参考价值。
Purpose The purpose of this study is to explain how factors relating to resource availability affect managerial risk-taking with regard to the geographic and institutional proximity of cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) targets. The paper further considers the impact of organizational learning by testing the moderating effect of the acquiring firms’ prior international M&A experience. Design/methodology/approach This study uses linear regression with robust standard errors to account for dependence among clustered observations at the firm level. The authors used country and industry fixed-effects specifications to account for unobserved heterogeneity. Findings The results suggest that when internal and external resources are more abundant, firms pursue cross-border M&As that are more geographically and institutionally distant. The findings further indicate that a firm’s prior international M&A experience positively moderates the aforementioned relationships.. Research limitations/implications Extending the behavioral theory of the firm beyond organizational slack resources, the results highlight the importance of taking a multi-level, open-systems perspective of the strategic impact of resource availability. The authors’ theory and findings also provide a more nuanced view of the critical role organizational learning plays in the relationship between resource availability and organizational outcomes. Originality/value This is the first study to the authors’ knowledge that develops and tests a theoretical model exploring the impact of both internal (organizational slack) and external (environmental munificence at both the industry and home-country levels) resource availability, as well as prior organizational experience on an important multinational business practice.