Multinational Enterprises and International Cartels: The Strategic Implications of De-globalization

A cartel is an association of independent businesses for the purpose of regulating trade in an industry. There are three important reasons for studying international cartels: they will become important in the future; they are of immense historical significance; and they are poorly understood. This paper reviews the economic, political, and historical literatures on international cartels and considers the lessons for international business theory and policy. If IB researchers are to retain their reputation for policy-relevance, they must engage with the issue of institutional responses to globalization, and this must include the analysis of cartels.

Benefitting from immigration: The value of immigrants’ country knowledge for firm internationalization

Migrants are able to provide firms with knowledge about their country of origin. This can become a valuable source of knowledge for firms in the process of internationalization. Relating to a Knowledge-Based-View perspective, this paper explains how the resource commitment of firms to foreign countries is contingent on immigration from those countries: Immigrants’ country knowledge reduces uncertainty and makes the governance of foreign operations more efficient. Moreover, this paper connects the relevance of knowledge for firm internationalization to institutional characteristics in immigrants’ home and host countries, both of which policymakers can shape. We test predictions on more than 13,000 observations over a 14-year period (2003–2016). The paper identifies economically significant contingencies of a positive effect of immigration, which are robust to changes in model specification, measurement, and sampling. The results indicate how immigration can shape firms’ investments abroad and have implications for developing policy as well as international business theory.