Understanding foreign divestment: The impacts of economic and political friction
研究了经济和政治差异如何影响跨国公司的外国撤资行为，发现经济摩擦有U型效应，政治摩擦有正向效应，基于2400家芬兰子公司数据。
Past research on foreign divestment has recognized the impact of economic and political differences1. However, the prior findings remain equivocal. We adopt the Positive Organizational Scholarship perspective to provide more contextualized insights into the effects of economic and political differences on foreign divestment. Specifically, we consider the juxtaposition of national differences and levels of firm interaction with the different contexts. Thus, we develop the concept of friction to assess levels of economic and political differences. We further argue that economic friction will have a curvilinear (U-shaped) effect on foreign divestment, whereas political friction will produce a monotonic (positive) effect. Moreover, we introduce ownership level as a moderator into the main hypotheses. Drawing on data from 2400 foreign subsidiaries of 310 Finnish multinational enterprises, from 1970–2010, we provide support for our main hypotheses, although the moderating effect of ownership levels is not supported. We further compare the effects of differences measured by friction with those measured by distance. Accordingly, our research highlights the importance of detecting specific conditions for the investigation of the impact of economic and political differences in the foreign divestment literature.