[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/stratm/v31y2010i12p1290-1315.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Political capabilities, policy risk, and international investment strategy: evidence from the global electric power generation industry

Author

Listed:
  • Guy L. F. Holburn
  • Bennet A. Zelner
Abstract
Whereas conventional wisdom holds that multinational enterprises (MNEs) invest less in host countries that pose greater policy risk—the risk that a government will opportunistically alter policies to expropriate an investing firm's profits or assets—we argue that MNEs vary in their response to host‐country policy risk as a result of differences in organizational capabilities for assessing such risk and managing the policy‐making process. We hypothesize that firms from home countries characterized by weaker institutional constraints on policy makers or greater redistributive pressures associated with political rent seeking will be less sensitive to host‐country policy risk in their international expansion strategies. Moreover, firms from home countries characterized by sufficiently weak institutional constraints or sufficiently strong redistributive pressures will seek out riskier host countries for their international investments to leverage their political capabilities, which permit them to attain and defend attractive positions or industry structures. We find support for our hypotheses in a statistical analysis of the foreign direct investment location choices of MNEs in the electric power generation industry during the period 1990–1999, the industry's first decade of internationalization. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Suggested Citation

  • Guy L. F. Holburn & Bennet A. Zelner, 2010. "Political capabilities, policy risk, and international investment strategy: evidence from the global electric power generation industry," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(12), pages 1290-1315, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:stratm:v:31:y:2010:i:12:p:1290-1315
    DOI: 10.1002/smj.860
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.860
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/smj.860?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:stratm:v:31:y:2010:i:12:p:1290-1315. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/0143-2095 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.