Untangling the Duality of Emerging Market Firms’ Response to Outward Foreign Direct Investment Policies on Their Innovation Performance: A Resource Dependence Perspective
基于资源依赖理论，研究新兴市场企业响应母国对外直接投资政策（以政策优惠市场中的OFDI项目占比衡量）如何通过支持与控制机制影响创新绩效（专利数），发现两者呈倒U型关系，且政府补贴会强化这一曲线效应。
Firms’ international expansion, affected by outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) policies of home countries, can greatly shape their innovation performance. Yet, existing literature lacks sufficient investigation toward the nexus between corporate response to policies in OFDI activities and subsequent innovation performance. Thus, this article examines how a firm's response to OFDI policies affects its innovation performance. Drawing on the resource dependence theory, the authors theorize corporate response to OFDI policies as firm dependence on home governments. They argue that such dependence differentially affects firm innovation through support and control mechanisms, and elucidate an inverted U-shaped relationship between corporate response to OFDI policies (measured by the percentage of a firm's OFDI projects in policy-favored markets) and innovation performance (measured as patent counts). Furthermore, this curvilinear relationship, they posit, is moderated and strengthened by home-government subsidies the firm receives (calculated as the ratio of annual subsidies received to yearly sales). The authors use archival data of 2,050 Chinese listed manufacturing firms responding to specific OFDI policies from 2013 to 2021 to corroborate their predictions. Overall, by illuminating the innovation implications of OFDI as a corporate response to policies, this study contributes to the international marketing literature in the context of emerging markets.