Following the Herd and Sleeping with the Enemy:
Strategies for Managing Policy Uncertainty
WITOLD J. HENISZ
Department of Management
The Wharton School
2021 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6370
Tel: (215) 898-0788
Fax: (215) 898-0401
E-mail: henisz@wharton.upenn.edu
ANDREW DELIOS
Department of Business Policy
National University of Singapore
1 Business Link, 117592
SINGAPORE
Tel: 65-6874-3094
Fax: 65-6775-5059
Email: andrew@nus.edu.sg
February 16, 2016
* This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Grant (#410-2001-0143) and an NUS Academic Research Grant (R-313-000-052-112). Thanks
to Ron Adner, Kimberly Bates, Joel Baum, Heather Berry, Emilio Castilla, Wilbur Chung, David
Collis, Javier Gimeno, Mauro Guillén, Tarun Khanna, Bruce Kogut, Xavier Martin, Patrick
Moreton, Lori Rosenkopf, Brian Silverman, Gabriel Szulanski and participants of the 2003
Strategic Research Forum for comments on previous drafts.
Following the Herd and Sleeping with the Enemy:
Strategies for Managing Policy Uncertainty
Abstract:
We examine the extent to which two sources of policy uncertainty influence foreign-owned
subsidiary exit rates. We find that prior peer exits and a firm’s own experience under the current
political regime both have a strong influence on subsidiary exit rates, particularly in the presence
of policy uncertainty resulting from the existing structure of a host country’s political
institutions. A firm's own experience under the current political regime of a host country,
however, enhances exit rates after changes in that regime. These findings point to tradeoffs
between two strategies for moderating political uncertainty. Influence strategies can provide
substantial gains to firms in uncertain policy environments so long as those environments
themselves are not at risk of radical flux. As the probability that a policy environment could
potentially enter a period of radical flux increases, a follow-the-herd strategy becomes more
prominent as this strategy avoids the negative consequences of the rapid depreciation of the
value of past organizational experience, in the event of a new political regime.
2
Uncertainty is a prominently featured construct in neoinstitutional research and international
business. A primary focus of neoinstitutional research is the mimetic response of an organization
to cues in its inter-organizational environment under conditions of uncertainty (Haunschild,
1994, Haunschild & Miner, 1997, Haveman, 1993). A parallel line of research in international
business examines how the accumulation of organizational experience reduces a firm’s exposure
to the potentially adverse influences of uncertainty (Barkema, Bell, & Pennings, 1996, Delios &
Henisz, 2003, Henisz & Delios, 2001).
We seek to integrate these two bodies of research by first unpacking the construct of uncertainty
to see whether uncertainty emerges from a lack of information about an external environment, or
from an underlying dynamism in that external environment (Duncan, 1972). We then examine
the conditions under which either a mimetic response to stimuli in the inter-organizational
environment, or a reliance upon organizational experience, is an effective strategy in the face of
these sources of uncertainty.
In making this examination, we highlight the idea that organizational experience can generate
signals and pressures for managers who seek to fashion strategic responses to uncertainty. This
experience, however, has its greatest utility for addressing uncertainty that stems from
information shortfalls, in stable environments. In sharp contrast to its positive effect in stable
environments, experience can become a liability for addressing information shortfalls, in a
dynamic or radically changed external environment. Meanwhile, the signals and pressures
generated by the inter-organizational environment, although less helpful than a firm’s own
experience in stable environments, do not transform into liabilities in dynamic or radically
changed external environments.
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To test these ideas, we focus on a specific dimension of a firm’s external environment, namely
the political environment. We look at two sources of uncertainty in the policies generated by
that political environment. The first source of policy uncertainty, political hazards, stems from
the structure of a nation’s existing political institutions that either provides substantial discretion
to policymakers or limits their discretion. The second, regime instability, takes the form of
widespread protests or concerted efforts to overthrow a nation’s existing political institutions.
Our empirical models examine the exit rates of 2,283 international expansions made by 642
Japanese manufacturing firms into 53 countries that differ in their levels of political hazards and
regime instability.
BACKGROUND
Environmental Uncertainty
Environmental uncertainty is among the foremost challenges with which an organization’s
management must contend (Thompson, 1967). A core tenet emerging from research in this area
is that organizations seek to avoid uncertainty (Cyert & March, 1963). The pervasiveness of the
phenomenon of uncertainty led to the extensive use of the aggregate construct of environmental
uncertainty in early studies on organizations (Downey & Slocum, 1975). This research pointed
to the idea that organizations differ in their reactions, and susceptibility, to environmental
uncertainty (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983 , Levitt & March, 1988). Organizational variance in
susceptibility to uncertainty stems from heterogeneous organizational resources (Miner,
Amburgey, & Stearns, 1990) and heterogeneous organizational information.
Research on organizations has begun to emphasize how different organizational information
sources can help to mitigate the uncertainty a firm encounters in its external environments
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(Haunschild, 1994, Haunschild & Miner, 1997), but it has yet to explore variations in the types
of uncertainty a firm faces in its environments, when making market entry decisions (Henisz &
Delios, 2001). The benefits of unpacking uncertainty can be profound if researchers strive for a
better understanding of the relative efficacy of a particular organizational response to
environmental uncertainty.
The idea of examining different types of uncertainty is not particularly novel as there is a long
tradition in organization theory research that has placed the construct of uncertainty at its focus
(Boyd, Dess, & Rasheed, 1993, Dess & Beard, 1984, Milliken, 1987). Aside from identifying
the importance of uncertainty in the external environment on decision-making in a firm, research
on organizations has helped to identify several definitional characteristics of perceived
uncertainty (Boyd, Dess, & Rasheed, 1993). Uncertainty concerns the lack of information in an
environment, given a specific decision-making scenario. This lack of information translates into
difficulties in accurately assessing the losses or gains associated with correct or incorrect
decisions (Duncan, 1972). Uncertainty also concerns rates and unpredictability of change in an
environment (Dess & Beard, 1984). As the results of dynamic change are hard to predict, it
heightens uncertainty for decision makers.
These characterizations of environmental uncertainty highlight two points of relevance for
differentiating among types of uncertainty.
First, uncertainty can emerge from a lack of
information about a particular environment. Second, uncertainty can arise from instability in that
environment.
If we examine organizational responses to these two broad types of uncertainty,
we can explore the relative efficacy of two key organizational responses to each type. In the first
organizational response, information derived from an organization’s experience in an
environment has been shown to reduce the influence of uncertainty in that environment for that
5
organization (Barkema, Bell, & Pennings, 1996, Delios & Henisz, 2000, Lu, 2002). A second
organizational response is grounded in research in neoinstitutional theory.
Neoinstitutional
scholars emphasize that managers can seek cues for responses to uncertainty from the interorganizational environment, or the actions of a reference group of organizations (Haunschild,
1994, Haunschild & Miner, 1997, Haveman, 1993).
These cues lead firms to imitate the
decisions, strategies and structures of one another, and the prevalence of mimetic behavior tends
to increase in the level of environmental uncertainty (Haunschild & Miner, 1997). In our
hypotheses, we discuss how organizational responses to uncertainty can vary depending on
whether the uncertainty comes from a lack of information about an environment, or from
environmental dynamism.
Two Sources of Policy Uncertainty
The international environment is a setting with copious sources of uncertainty. Scholars have
long recognized that cultural, economic, legal, social and political variance by nation injects
substantial amounts of uncertainty in a firm’s decisions when it undertakes an international
expansion (Barkema, Bell, & Pennings, 1996, Eriksson, Johanson, Majkgard, & Sharma, 1997,
Henisz, 2000b). An international expansion is a form of organizational growth in which a firm
undertakes a foreign direct investment to form a foreign subsidiary in a country other than the
one in which it is domiciled.
When expanding internationally, a firm’s management often must contend with a new culture, a
new language, a new social system, new market structures, and a new political system. To
manage an expansion in a new political environment, a firm’s management should understand
the current and future policies that define the rules and regulations for a firm’s operations (e.g.,
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taxes or quantitative restrictions on production, foreign trade and employment and any
exemptions thereto; regulations in the realm of employee hiring and firing, benefits, health and
safety and the local or national environment) and thereby influence its profitability.
The status quo policies and any changes therein are the outcome of a policymaking process in
which various interest groups seek to lobby or influence policymakers who interact within
formal or informal policymaking structures. The level of uncertainty over future policies is
therefore a function of both the current policymaking structure (i.e., the extent to which it
provides checks and balances against the discretion of existing policymakers) and the stability of
the existing political structure.
Where political institutions include many checks and balances, such as among the executive,
legislative, judicial and sub-federal branches, policymakers are constrained in their choice of
policies by other political actors who must approve any change from the status quo policy
(Henisz, 2000a, North, 1990). Countries with extensive checks and balances in the formal
policymaking apparatus, such as the United States, Germany and Switzerland, tend to have the
lowest levels of policy uncertainty as the multiple veto players involved in the policy making
process, find it difficult to agree to change the status quo policy. Policy uncertainty increases as
the number of veto players declines or as their preferences become more homogeneous, such as
is the case in moving to a mixed Parliamentary-Presidential system, as typified by France or
Brazil, to heavily fractionalized Parliamentary systems like Belgium, Israel or the Netherlands to
Westminster Parliamentary systems with winner-take-all districts like the United Kingdom.
Transitional and non-democratic states have the highest levels of policy uncertainty as the formal
institutional structure in these states provides tremendous discretion to policymakers.
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A second source of policy uncertainty is the threat of the emergence of a new political regime.
Where disaffected interest groups are militating for fundamental political reform, the very rules
by which policies are made are called into question. The identity of the future political
leadership, the process of policymaking and the interest groups allotted voice or excluded from
the political process are each uncertain when there are calls by interest groups for radical
political change. Any of these changes would increase the level of policy uncertainty and
simultaneous changes in all would have an even greater effect.
The Relative Efficacy of Two Strategies for Reacting to Policy Uncertainty
Given that increases in policy uncertainty generate corresponding increases in the variance of a
subsidiary’s expected profitability, effective strategies for reacting to policy uncertainty can
generate substantial value for a firm. Firms seek to identify a country’s level of policy
uncertainty prior to investing and will only enter a country where the expected returns justify the
additional variance in those returns. One would not therefore expect an independent effect of
policy uncertainty on subsidiary performance. The exit rates of subsidiaries in a country with
high policy uncertainty, however, may vary according to the efficacy of the strategies that these
subsidiaries take to moderate the effect of policy uncertainty on their operations particularly
where those strategies involve tradeoffs that can not readily be assessed at the time of entry.
A basic strategy for a firm to pursue to moderate future policy uncertainty is to devote resources
to the identification of political risks and opportunities and to the influence of the policymaking
process. If a firm pursues this strategy, it needs to identify the pivotal political actors that
influence the policies of interest to them (Holburn & Vanden Bergh, 2002, Krehbiel, 1999) and
to develop influence strategies to guard against inimical policy change by those actors that serve
8
the interests of the broader polity, their buyers or suppliers, their competitors or political actors at
the firms’ expense (Henisz & Zelner, 2004). These influence strategies include the development
of or participation in a lobbying coalition to deliver a message to these pivotal actors and the
tailoring of that message to maximize the likelihood that those who receive the message will act
upon it.
The magnitude of a firm’s resource commitments to these influence strategies depends upon
their relative efficacy in reducing policy uncertainty. As the checks and balances within a
country’s political institutions diminish (i.e., the political hazards increase), policymakers’
discretion increases and influence strategies can offer more substantive reductions in policy
uncertainty.
The nature of the lobbying coalition and the message that they deliver to that pivotal actor is also
a function of the pivotal actor’s preferences and position in the institutional structure. Changes
in the political regime (Feng, 2001, Kobrin, 1979) which alter the interest groups represented in
government and the nature of interactions among political institutions may therefore reduce the
value of past investments in cultivating contacts, developing lobbying coalitions and delivering
messages, for reducing uncertainties about future policies in a given nation. Given the potential
depreciation of past investments and the large fixed costs to begin anew under a new political
regime, the efficacy of influence strategies is likely a decreasing function of regime instability.
A second strategy available to managers facing policy uncertainty, is to examine the strategic
decisions of their peers and infer unobservable calculations on the expected level of profitability
based on the observable entry and exit decisions of peers (Baum, Li, & Usher, 2000, Miner &
Haunschild, 1995). Based on their assessment of the accuracy of the information signal in these
9
observations, managers could then update their prior beliefs regarding profitability levels.
Managers could also conclude that despite any internal reservations they had about the strategies
adopted by their peers, it could possibly pay to imitate their peers decisions rather than deviate
from these decisions (Abrahamson & Rosenkopf, 1993). Finally, managers could eschew
individual analysis of the policy environment or augment these analyses by imitating the
strategic decisions of peers whose actions are perceived as legitimate (DiMaggio & Powell,
1983, Haunschild & Miner, 1997), by following rules-of-thumb (March, 1988) or by simply
following habits (Geertz, 1978).
Although directly observing a firm’s investments in political risk identification and management
is difficult, it is possible to link observed variation in organizational performance under varying
degrees of policy uncertainty to organizational characteristics that are associated with the
adoption of these two strategies for managing uncertainty in the political environment. In our
hypotheses, we will argue that firms with greater levels of organizational experience under the
current political regime have an advantage over competitors in mounting an influence strategy.
This advantage should be manifest in better performance, which we measure by subsidiary exit
rates, in political environments where such strategies are likely to be more efficacious, that is,
where policy uncertainty that derives from political hazards is high. In contrast, these same firms
should have higher subsidiary exit rates in political environments where such strategies are likely
to be less efficacious. We also directly examine the strategy of imitating peer exit under policy
uncertainty of various types.
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HYPOTHESES
Organizational Experience and Influence Strategies
A manager’s own experiences condition responses to policy uncertainty emanating from political
hazards. This influence emerges from the process by which heterogeneous experience profiles
help generate differential capabilities across organizations to identify and mitigate uncertainty
that emanates from the political environment.
These capabilities stem from routine-based
systems that accumulate over the course of experiential learning (Cyert & March, 1963,
Levinthal & March, 1981).
An organization’s routines are its encoded actions that encapsulate the knowledge and
capabilities developed in its experiential learning (Nelson & Winter, 1982). Routines develop
through an incremental process, in which an organization’s existing routines are updated based
upon how managers interpret signals generated by their current decisions and associated
outcomes. Chang (1995) and Pennings, Barkema and Douma (1994) provide empirical evidence
consistent with such learning processes in their respective studies of expansion into new
geographic and product markets. Similarly, Delios and Henisz (2000) and Barkema, Bell and
Pennings (1996) find evidence that firms with extensive experience are better able to manage
relationships with joint venture partners than inexperienced firms, even in the presence of policy
or cultural uncertainty.
Experiential learning that can lead to the development of appropriate routines can enhance the
efficacy of organizational strategies in the face of uncertainty emanating from a lack of
information about an environment. In the case of policy uncertainty that comes from political
hazards, prior experience in a given policymaking structure provides information that helps
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managers to improve their forecasts of future policies. Managers with relevant experience in a
given policy setting can develop a good understanding of the nature of coalitions that could be
formed, the preferences of policymakers, the compromises that a given political party or interest
group are willing to make, the length of time it will take for a policy innovation to be enacted or
other context-specific information that facilitates the delimitation of a choice set for their
analysis (Geertz, 1978). Managers can use this information to identify those actors for whom a
shift in preferences will generate the largest change in the final policy outcomes and focus their
lobbying or informational strategies upon those pivotal actors (Holburn & Vanden Bergh, 2002).
These actors may include politicians, interest groups or alliance partners with strong political
connections (Hitt, Dacin, Levitas, Arregle, & Borza, 2000). Not only will prior experience
facilitate the identification of these pivotal actors but it also facilitates the identification and
implementation of an effective lobbying strategy (Henisz & Zelner, 2004).
A lobbying strategy is undertaken in a context in which cognitively limited and time-constrained
political actors are typically overburdened with multiple appeals for assistance from conflicting
interest groups. These actors must balance whatever desires they have to serve the public
welfare of their constituents or their nation, with the burdens of maintaining office through
soliciting campaign contributions, votes or interest group support (Kingdon, 1984). As a result,
political actors respond more strongly to appeals that are closely linked to large blocks of
political or financial support (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). Such appeals are rarely esoteric or
extremely technical in nature but rather appeal to broad-based beliefs or fit within existing
“master frames” (Benford & Snow, 2000) that conform to preexisting heuristics, beliefs and
biases (Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988). Frames allow for the simplification of complex debate into a
limited set of readily identifiable dimensions that reduce the burden for participation and
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decision (Benford & Snow, 2000). For example, lobbying on the rate of telecommunications
interconnection based on technical arguments surrounding actual costs or opportunity costs is
less likely to be effective than appeals for free and fair competition. The latter “frame” appeals to
an existing heuristic instantly recognizable by actors who have no inherent preference on
interconnection pricing and no desire to enmesh themselves in the intricacies of the debate.
Experiential learning within a given structure of political institutions can thus aid an organization
grappling with policy uncertainty emanating from that structure by reducing its lack of
information that is the foundation for this form of uncertainty, and by extending its competence
base as captured in routines that identify likely future policies, the pivotal actors that determine
those policies and the lobbying or informational strategies that can most cost-effectively alter the
opinion of these actors and, thereby, policy outcomes. The accumulation of relevant experience
provides an organization with the opportunity to exploit its existing knowledge and routines in
the current political environment, while also providing an opportunity to expand upon that
knowledge and further refine its routines.
Hypothesis 1 (H1): As policy uncertainty emanating from political hazards increases,
an organization’s experience under the current political regime has an increasingly
negative effect on its subsidiaries’ exit rates.
Although refining and exploiting organizational routines in a specific political context, reinforces
an organization’s competences to manage policy uncertainty, it is important to note that such
refinement and exploitation carries the potential of maladaptation should the political context be
dynamic or in flux (Amburgey & Miner, 1992). In this regard, policy uncertainty that emerges
from environmental dynamism, which in the political context takes the form of regime
13
instability, concerns managers as these changes can alter success criteria for managing the
political environment.
As the success criteria can change, the organizational experience under the current political
regime that may alleviate the influence of policy uncertainty provides little benefit to the
management of policy uncertainty that emanated from a change in the political regime.
Resources such as cultivated contacts and learned routines regarding lobbying processes
developed for one political regime are imperfectly redeployable to its successor.
Learned
routines for mitigating policy uncertainty can even potentially become a liability in the aftermath
of a regime transition. A firm that made an international expansion under one political regime,
and accumulated experience relevant to the policy making of that particular regime, could find
itself maladapted or even at a disadvantage under its successor. This maladaptation can enhance
rates of exit in the presence of instability of the current regime or after a transition to a new
regime (Baum & Ingram, 1998, Ingram & Baum, 1997). A straightforward example of this is the
strategy of partnering with a Suharto family member in Indonesia. Such partnerships greatly
enhanced performance up to 1997, but these same partnerships then greatly enhanced exit rates
after the change in the regime led to Suharto’s successors launching a campaign against
corruption, cronyism and nepotism.
Hypothesis 2a (H2a): As policy uncertainty emanating from regime instability
increases, an organization’s experience under the current political regime has an
increasingly positive effect on its subsidiaries’ exit rates.
Hypothesis 2b (H2b): The greater an organization’s experience under previous
political regimes, the higher its subsidiaries’ exit rates.
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Imitation of Peer Exits
The second strategy for managing policy uncertainty follows from the idea that a firm’s
managers can imitate the decisions of peer firms to contend with uncertainty from the political
environment. This idea has strong roots in neoinstitutional theory, which has a perspective on
organizational action that views inter-organizational linkages (Haunschild, 1994) and reference
groups (Greve, 2000, Haunschild & Miner, 1997) as influencing organizational exit rates by
providing an organization with support or legitimacy (Ingram & Baum, 1997).
Under conditions of uncertainty, organizations turn to the behavior of peers, which drives the
process of mimetic isomorphism, or the process by which organizations become more similar
over time (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Imitation can emerge as an organizational strategy
because repeated actions by other organizations convey legitimacy and pressures on
organizational actors to adopt similar decisions, thus inducing a spread of a decision, structure or
strategy across a set of organizations (Fligstein, 1985).
An emerging view within the neoinstitutional literature represents a transition from the viewpoint
that imitation is a pure social response (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), to the idea that imitation
may involve a technical rationale (Abrahamson & Rosenkopf, 1993). Research points to the idea
that the strength of the technical rationale is related to the salience of an imitable organizational
structure or strategy. Where an organizational action has an observable outcome (Haunschild &
Miner, 1997), or where an organization’s environment is somewhat predictable (Argote,
Beckman, & Epple, 1990), salience is greater, as is the strength of the technical rationale. This
latter point relates to the idea that imitative behavior can be a result of vicarious learning about
organizational actions in unequivocal settings in which the results of a strategy are observable
15
(Baum, Li, & Usher, 2000, Levitt & March, 1988). Prior work in the Japanese banking industry
highlights the role of such learning processes in market niche entry decisions (Greve, 2000).
Research on rational bandwagons conveys a similar prediction. Organizations can exhibit
similarity and clustering in decisions and outcomes, such as organizational adoption, based on a
concern that deviating from the practices of early adopters will carry negative performance
consequences (Abrahamson & Rosenkopf, 1993).
Not all bandwagon effects are strictly
technical, however. Bandwagon imitation can occur even in the presence of negative information
on the performance of early adopters, or where there is uncertainty about the long-term
performance implications of a strategy (Rosenkopf & Abrahamson, 1999).
Another technical rationale for the adoption of strategies previously used by one’s peers relies on
the assumption of incomplete information, which can lead managers to infer profitable strategies
for their own organization based on the behavior of other organizations that share similar traits
(Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, & Welch, 1998). Note that in parallel to the arguments of social
legitimacy, arguments that hinge on vicarious learning or rational bandwagon explanations also
conclude with the point that uncertainty enhances the tendency to imitate other organizations. In
the case of vicarious learning and rational bandwagons, however, imitation occurs because of its
impact on incomplete information. Given that these arguments are parallel, we expect that
imitation will be an effective response to uncertainty, whether that uncertainty emerges from a
lack of information about an environment, as in the case of policy uncertainty, or from a dynamic
change in the environment, as in the case of regime instability.
Hypothesis 3a (H3a): As policy uncertainty emanating from political hazards increases,
prior peer exits have an increasingly positive effect on subsidiary exit rates.
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Hypothesis 3b (H3b): As policy uncertainty emanating from regime instability
increases, prior peer exits have an increasingly positive effect on subsidiary exit rates.
METHODS
Data Sources and Sample
We test these hypotheses using longitudinal data on the foreign subsidiaries of Japanese firms.
Japan has been a leading source of FDI, which has flowed to an extensive number of countries.
According to the data we compiled, by 2000, more than 120 countries had received Japanese
FDI, with 54 countries possessing at least 30 Japanese subsidiaries. This large country spread
provides the variance we require on our measures of policy uncertainty and regime instability, to
test this study’s hypotheses, while controlling for other nation-level influences on exit rates.
We derived our sample from the list of subsidiaries provided in Toyo Keizai’s compendium of
FDI, Japanese Overseas Investment. We used each annual edition from 1992 to 2001 to
construct longitudinal profiles of Japanese subsidiaries for the 1991 to 2000 period. These
profiles included information on the country and date of subsidiary establishment and the year of
subsidiary exit, if an exit occurred. This process identified 28,525 subsidiaries that existed in the
1991-2000 period, of which 34.5 percent (9,859 subsidiaries) had exited by 2000.
We focused on the analysis of manufacturing subsidiaries of manufacturing firms, as the capital
costs involved in building a manufacturing plant are central to the theoretical arguments
surrounding the effect of policy uncertainty on exit rates. We limited our sample to subsidiaries
formed in the 1991-2000 period to remove left-censored cases from our analysis. Our
independent measures of investment experience, density and the like are, where appropriate,
17
drawn from the full sample of observations including those formed prior to 1991. Our sample
comprised 2,283 manufacturing subsidiaries, formed in the 1991-2000 period by 642 Japanese
manufacturing firms in 53 countries of which 17.7 percent (405 subsidiaries) had exited by 2000.
Dependent Variable
Our dependent variable, Exit, was an indicator variable, Ext, that took a value of 1 if subsidiary x
exited at time t. Observations started in the year 1992, continued until an exit occurred, or were
right-censored in 2000, if the indicator variable Ext was zero in each year t for subsidiary x. Exits
occurred in 38 of the 53 countries with the highest count of exits in China (105), the United
States (88), Thailand (29), Taiwan (20), the United Kingdom (19), Indonesia (19), Malaysia (19),
Hong Kong (14), France (13) and Germany (12).
Independent Variables
Political Hazards. The political hazards index (political hazards) measures the extent to which a
change in the preferences of any one actor may lead to a change in government policy (Henisz,
2000a). The first step in the construction of this index is the identification of the number of
independent branches of government (executive, lower and upper legislative chambers, judiciary
and states or provinces) with veto power over policy change. The preferences of each of these
branches and the status-quo policy were then assumed to be independently and identically drawn
from a uniform, unidimensional policy space. This assumption allows for the derivation of a
quantitative measure of policy uncertainty using a simple spatial model of political interaction.
The initial measure is then modified to take into account the extent of alignment across branches
of government using data on the party composition of the executive and legislative branches.
Alignment across branches increased the feasibility of policy change. The measure is then
18
further refined to capture the extent of preference heterogeneity within each legislative branch.
Greater within-branch heterogeneity increases the costs of overturning policy for aligned
branches.
The main results of the derivation are that (1) each additional veto point (a branch of government
that is both constitutionally effective and controlled by a party different from other branches)
provides a negative but diminishing effect on the total level of hazards and (2) homogeneity (or
heterogeneity) of party preferences within an opposed (or aligned) branch of government is
negatively correlated with the level of hazards. Scores for political hazards for a given country in
a given year ranged from 0.1 (minimal hazards) to 1.0 (extremely hazardous).1 The ten countries
with the highest policy uncertainty that received Japanese foreign direct investment were
Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and
Vietnam. The ten countries with the lowest policy uncertainty were Australia, Belgium, Canada,
Chile, Denmark, Finland, Israel, Slovak Republic, Switzerland and the United States.
Regime Instability. Our measure of regime instability is an annual count of government crises,
constitutional changes and successful coups as provided by the Cross-National Time Series
Database. This measure was time-varying and lagged by one year. The ten countries with the
highest regime instability that received Japanese foreign direct investment were the Russian
Federation, India, Italy, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela, Thailand, Romania, Indonesia and Israel.
The countries with the lowest regime instability were Australia, Bolivia, Cambodia, Chile,
China, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Korea, Luxembourg, Malaysia,
Mexico, Myanmar, the Philippines, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, the
1
The data and additional detail on its construction can be downloaded from http://www-management.wharton.upenn.edu/henisz/.
19
United States and Vietnam. Note that these 24 countries include some with very high and some
with very low policy uncertainty indicating the independent nature of these two constructs.
Organizational experience. Using the political history for each country in our sample as provided
in the Cross-National Time Series Database, the Polity dataset (Gurr, 2001) and The Statesman’s
Yearbook (Turner, various), we calculated Host country experience under the current political
regime and Host country experience under other political regimes as the log of the years of
investment history a firm possessed under the current structure of political institutions (those in
existence on January 1 of the reporting year) and under its predecessors. The most embedded
firm-country pairs were Panasonic, Sanyo, Nissan, Toyota and Honda in the United States. The
most embedded non-US pairs were Panasonic and Sanyo in China.
Prior Exits. To measure the prevalence of mimetic isomorphism in exit behavior (Greve, 1995)
we constructed, percentage of peer subsidiaries that exited in the prior year, which was the
percentage of Japanese subsidiaries in the same 3-digit SIC industry and country as a focal
subsidiary that exited in a given year. This measure was time-varying and lagged by one year.
There were 41 instances in 28 countries in which all of a firm’s peers in the same 3-digit industry
exited in a given year.
Industry, Firm and Subsidiary Controls. To capture national population-level effects of
legitimation and competition (Hannan & Freeman, 1989), we measured the density of Japanese
firms’ activities in the host country of a focal subsidiary. Given the absence of comparable data
on the multinational spread of firms from other nations, we follow previous work in the
international arena and operationalize this construct using the population of Japanese subsidiaries
alone (Mitchell, Shaver, & Yeung, 1994). Density was the number of Japanese subsidiaries
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operating in a given year in a focal subsidiary’s industry and country. We introduced both raw
counts and a quadratic term.
To account for the levels of flexibility a firm has to shift production from one location to the next
in response to shocks (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1990, Kogut, 1983) we included Other subsidiaries,
world. We defined this measure as the number of foreign subsidiaries owned by a firm in a
given year. Other subsidiaries, host country was the number of foreign subsidiaries owned by a
firm in a host country in a year. To examine the role of own firm exits in other countries to
control for firm-specific factors that could lead to a global retrenchment independent of
environmental uncertainty and to control for unobserved firm-level factors that could lead to a
pattern of global exits by a firm, we included a count of Exits, rest of world, which was the
number of subsidiaries of a firm that exited in a given year.
To account for the effect of organizational ties (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), we developed two
measures of a firm’s business group affiliations: horizontal business group and vertical business
group. These indicator variables respectively marked whether a firm had an affiliation with any
of the horizontal groups, or any of the vertical groups, in Japan. The source for these measures
was Dodwell’s publication, Industrial Groupings in Japan: The Anatomy of Keiretsu.
Finally, we included firm age and subsidiary age and their square terms in all models to examine
for liabilities of newness (Freeman, Carroll, & Hannan, 1983), adolescence (Bruderl &
Schussler, 1990) and age (Barron, West, & Hannan, 1994). We measured firm size with the
logarithm of firm employment (Freeman, Carroll, & Hannan, 1983). We sourced these timevarying measures from the Nikkei NEEDS tapes and Japanese Overseas Investment.
21
Country controls. Country-level determinants of subsidiary exit rates could include market
demand and market potential (Carroll & Hannan, 1989). We included the log of two timevarying, lagged measures: Log (Gross Domestic Product per capita) and Log (population), as
sourced from the World Development Indicators 2002 of the World Bank.
Fixed Effects. We used regional indicator variables as proxies for transportation costs and
cultural differences and, to some extent, for differences in investment motivations that may
influence exit rates, as well as to capture time-invariant differences across world regions: Africa,
Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Central America and the Caribbean, former British colonies,
the Middle East, South America and Western Europe. Annual fixed effects capture variation in
exchange rates and global economic conditions. Industry fixed effects capture sectoral variation
in exit prevalence at the Japanese equivalent of a 2-digit SIC code.
Summary Statistics. Table 1 provides a correlation matrix. Include in Table 1 are descriptive
statistics for the variables included in the full sample and the subsamples in which exit did and
did not occur.
- Insert Table 1 about here Modeling Procedure
We estimated exit rates using event history analysis, as implemented by an exponential model.
Event history analysis uses a longitudinal record of events in a sample from a population to
examine the influences that a set of covariates have on an event. Our focal event is an exit by a
subsidiary. In the analysis, each subsidiary x is at risk of exit from country i in each time period t,
22
or until its exit occurs. This technique models the rate of a transition from an origin state to a
destination state (exit) as a function of the covariates. Its general form is:
rjk = exp (jk0 + Ajk1jk1 + Ajk2jk2…)
where rjk is the transition rate from origin state j to destination state k, with the observed
covariate vector Ajk, parameters to be estimated jk and constant jk0. The duration of an event is
described by an exponential distribution. The relationship between the covariates and the
transition rate is specified as log-linear to ensure transition rate estimates are not negative. The
estimation uses the maximum likelihood method (Blossfeld & Rohwer, 1995). In the log-relative
hazard parameterization we employ, hazard ratios greater (less) than one indicate exit rates
increase (decrease) when the associated covariate increases in value. To estimate this model, we
expanded the base sample into multiple spells that included all subsidiary-country-year
combinations among the subsidiaries, countries and annual time periods in which an exit could
occur. In each spell, a subsidiary was at risk of exiting and was treated as right censored unless
an exit occurred. Once we divided the data into annual spells, we had as many as 12,206
observations but this dropped to 9,831 after casewise deletion of observations with missing
independent variables.
RESULTS
Table 2 presents the results of our analysis, incrementally adding the theoretical variables of
interest. Models 1 and 2 present hazard ratios for the national, industry, firm and subsidiary-level
control variables. Statistically significant hazard ratios of less than one indicate a reduction in
exit rates whereas ratios greater than one indicate an increase in exit rates. Firm age initially
reduces but subsequently increases exit rates. Subsidiary age has the opposite effect: first
23
increasing but subsequently reducing exit rates. Membership in a horizontal business group
reduces subsidiary exit rates. Firms with a larger global scope of operations experienced lower
subsidiary exit rates and firms with a larger local scope of operations had higher subsidiary exit
rates, consistent with the notions that other international operations increase a firm’s leverage in
negotiating with the government, while larger local operations enhance a firm’s flexibility to
relocate production across local plants.
We observed a strong positive relationship between a firm’s exits in the rest of the world and the
focal country suggesting that corporate strategies of downsizing have a significant effect across
multiple host country markets independent of any country-specific considerations. Size had no
independent effect on subsidiary exit rates nor did country-industry density or our country-level
macroeconomic variables. The year, region and industry indicator variables improved the
model’s explanatory power. Subsidiary exit rates were higher in Europe and South America and
in 1996-99, than in the excluded region-years of Asia in 1992-93.
-- Insert Table 2 About Here -Model 3 adds the main effects for the two determinants of policy uncertainty: political hazards
and regime instability. As we expected, we observed no direct relationship between either of our
determinants of policy uncertainty and subsidiary exit rates. Model 4 adds the main effects for
the percentage of peer subsidiaries that exited in the prior year and organizational experience
both under the current political regime and those that preceded it. Here, we observe a significant
and substantial effect of prior peer exits and a liability of experience that is larger for experience
under preceding regimes than that for experience under the current regime. We tested for the
presence of a quadratic relationship, but the effect of host country experience was adequately
24
captured by the logarithmic measure introduced here. Models 5 and 6 individually add the sets of
interaction effects that are the focus of our empirical tests and Model 7 includes both sets.
In models 3-7, the hazard ratios from Model 2 are qualitatively unchanged although the hazard
ratios for subsidiary age and horizontal business groups are no longer statistically significant in
the latter models. Country-industry density becomes weakly significant indicating some evidence
for legitimation and competition effects.
In models 5-7, the hazard ratios on our interaction terms provide good empirical support for four
of our five hypotheses. In contrast to the lack of a direct relationship between any of the
determinants of policy uncertainty or the measure of experience under the current political
regime and subsidiary exit rates, the interactions in Model 7, which are consistent with those in
models 5 and 6, demonstrate that exit rates for firms with this type of experience that should
facilitate the implementation of influence strategies so long as the environment remains stable,
have lower exit rates as political hazards increases (H1). We also find that experience under the
current regime increases exit rates as regime instability increases (H2a) and that experience
under past regimes increases subsidiary exit rates (H2b). Consistent with Hypothesis 3a, the
predicted effect of percentage of peer subsidiaries that exited in the prior year on subsidiary exit
is greater, the higher the political hazards. Subsidiaries are more likely to exit a country when
peers exit, particularly in the presence of uncertainty over future policies generated by the
structure of a nation’s political institutions. We do not find support for H3b which predicted a
similar relationship between prior exits and regime instability.
An examination of hazard rate multipliers for various combinations of the independent variables
of theoretical interest, as depicted in Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4, demonstrates the economic
25
significance of the results reported in Table 2. In Figure 1, we plot the predicted hazard ratios
associated with setting policy uncertainty at the value given on the x-axis and experience under
the current political leadership and prior governments at one standard deviation above (high) or
below (low) the mean, as indicated in the legend. We see sharp differences between subsidiaries
with high and low levels of experience under the current political regime. As predicted by H1,
the subsidiaries with high experience display a negative relationship between subsidiary exit
rates, as plotted on the y-axis, and the level of political hazards. Subsidiaries with low
experience, in contrast, display a positive relationship. For example, if we compare firms with
no experience under prior regimes, the effect of increasing political hazards by one standard
deviation (0.4) from its mean value (0.6) is to increase exit rates for a firm with low levels of
experience under the current political regime by 9 percent. The same increase in political hazards
leads to a reduction in exit rates of 63 percent, for a firm with high levels of experience under the
current political regime. For firms with high levels of experience under prior regimes, the effect
is more muted varying from a 4 percent increase in exit rates to a 16 percent decrease.
Figures 2 and 3 demonstrate the liability of experience in the political environment by plotting
the hazard rate multipliers relative to the values plotted in Figure 1 when the same subsidiary
faces a potential or actual change in political regime (H2a) or possesses experience from prior
regimes (H2b). Consistent with H2a, Figure 2 shows that regime instability increases exit rates
particularly for those firms with high levels of experience under the current regime. For these
firms, the hazard rate of exit increases by between 225 (when political hazards are at their
minimum and the possibility of retribution is therefore reduced) and 710 percent (when political
hazards are at their maximum and the possibility of retribution is therefore enhanced). By
contrast, for firms with low experience under the current regime, the effects are minimal ranging
26
from 4 to 5 percent. Consistent with H2b, Figure 3 shows that firms with experience under
previous regimes one standard deviation above the mean have exit rates 217 to 883 percent
higher, with the greatest effect felt by those firms that possess minimal experience under the
current political regime.
In Figure 4, we examine the marginal effect on the predicted hazard ratio of the percentage of
peer subsidiaries that exited in the prior year at low (one standard deviation below the mean) and
high (one standard deviation above the mean) values of policy uncertainty. We find that when
just one percent of peer subsidiaries exited in the prior year, the predicted exit rate was 43 to 54
percent lower than at the mean value of prior peer exits. Meanwhile, when 20 percent of peer
subsidiaries exit, the effect is to increase exit rates by 872 to 1085 percent. Consistent with H3a,
the relationship between the prior exit of peer subsidiaries and the exit rate of a firm’s
subsidiaries is particularly strong where policy uncertainty is high. As compared to environments
with low policy uncertainty, those with high levels of policy uncertainty show a 24 percent
increase in the effect of prior peer exits.
-- Insert Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 About Here -Sensitivity Analyses
We examined the sensitivity of our results to several alternative theoretical explanations and
distributional assumptions regarding hazard rates across time. First, we examined several
definitions of the inter-organizational environment so as to insure that our definition of a peer
group at the level of the industry was not driving our results. We divided all Japanese firms into
high and low status cohorts where status was defined by size (sales, assets or employees) and
age. We found consistent evidence of imitation in both the high and low status subsamples
27
though the effects were much stronger among high status firms as suggested by the work of
Stuart, Hoang and Hybels (1999). The effects of organizational experience (both positive and
negative), were strongest for smaller, although not necessarily younger, firms.
Next, we examined if the experience measures proxied for the resource buffering effect of firm
size or diversification that would minimize the impact of uncertainty (Thompson, 1967).
Interactions of policy uncertainty and regime instability with indicator variables for horizontal or
vertical group membership and employment and sales proxies for firm size failed to generate
statistically significant coefficient estimates or to change the results in our base specification.
Given the literature on culture and subsidiary performance (Barkema, Bell, & Pennings, 1996),
we added measures of cultural uncertainty and interacted these with measures of referent and
own-firm experience in the same cultural block. These additions did not alter our results.
Prior studies have found links between corporate performance and exit rates using such proxies
as a firm’s return-on-sales or return-on-assets, but the inclusion of these variables did not
improve the fit of our model. Similarly, multiple proxies for a country’s cost of capital
(Anderson & Tushman, 2001) did not improve model fit. We examined the role of tax policies at
the aggregate level and found a positive association between the rate of capital taxation and
subsidiary exit in the reduced sample of country-years for which tax data were available. Once
again, the results of theoretical interest were unchanged. We introduced additional
macroeconomic data into the specification. When we included the change in the real effective
exchange rate, the growth in real per capita income, the growth of population, the percentage of
value-added from manufacturing, the government budget balance, and the government debt to
GDP ratio, the results did not change substantively.
28
We examined the sensitivity of our results in our base specification to various hazard functions
including the Cox proportional hazards model, a Weibull distribution and a Gamma distribution.
The results were qualitatively unchanged across these functional forms.
DISCUSSION
We investigated the phenomenon of subsidiary exit in international expansions.
As these
expansions were made across clearly-defined national borders, we were able to test for the
influence of a particular type of environmental uncertainty emanating from differences in
national political structures, namely policy uncertainty, on subsidiary exit rates. Although we
observed no direct influence of two determinants of policy uncertainty – political hazards and
regime instability – on exit rates, we did find that these determinants of policy uncertainty
differentially affected exit rates depending on a firm’s level and type of experience in a host
country and the actions of its peer firms.
Despite the prominence attached to the concept of environmental influences in neoinstitutional
research, the question of the relative efficacy of various firm strategies for managing various
types of environmental uncertainty remains relatively under-explored.
Further, despite the
prominent role ascribed to political change and political processes in organizational survival
(Haveman, Russo, & Meyer, 2001, Ranger-Moore, 1997), neoinstitutional research has only
recently started to exploit the natural variation in the political environment in an international
setting (Guillén, 2002, Henisz & Delios, 2001, Martin, Swaminathan, & Mitchell, 1998). Our
results address both of these limitations in previous research.
Notably, we find that two determinants of policy uncertainty, political hazards and regime
instability, did not directly lead to higher rates of subsidiary exit. This observation stands
29
somewhat in contrast to the general finding that environmental uncertainty creates differential
stresses on organizations such that when uncertainty is heightened, an organization’s ability to
adapt to its changed environment, will vary in such characteristics as age (Ranger-Moore, 1997),
size (Amburgey, Kelly, & Barnett, 1993), and inter-organizational linkages (Kraatz, 1998).
Given that the context of our study is organizational expansion into a new market, our
observation of no baseline influence of policy uncertainty on exit rates implies that organizations
self-select into environments with varying levels of uncertainty. Environments that have higher
levels of uncertainty ex ante are populated by organizations that have the capabilities to manage
this form of uncertainty or potential returns that warrant an attempt to do so. In this sense, at
least in the context of international expansion, uncertainty itself does not elevate exit rates.
Within a particular policy environment, however, we observed that subsidiaries do exhibit
differential rates of exit depending on the level and type of experience a firm possesses, as well
as the actions of peer firms. This variation is linked to the nature of policy uncertainty realized
in a given country ex post. Specifically, if the structure of a host country’s political institutions
lends a wide range of discretion to policymakers, a firm’s experience within that institutional
structure may help provide it with useful information and resources that can aid in influencing
policy outcomes. This experience can thereby reduce realized policy uncertainty. By contrast,
where political institutions themselves are subject to discontinuous change, firms face even
greater difficulties in influencing policy outcomes. Furthermore, the same information and
resources that may have been important assets in the past can be transformed into substantial
liabilities. This finding reinforces the notion that experience provides an organization with an
advantage over its competitors as long as conditions in the environment remain comparatively
stable. In the aftermath of environmental change, inexperienced organizations can be at an
30
advantage relative to their experienced counterparts.
After an environmental change, an
inexperienced organization faces a single hurdle in learning about the new environment, while an
experienced counterpart faces a double-hurdle of learning about the new environment, while
trying to slough resources and routines related to the old environment.
Our examination of exit decisions also provides a useful extension to research on interorganizational influences to environmental uncertainty. Extant research has focused on the entry
decision (Guillén, 2002, Haunschild & Miner, 1997, Henisz & Delios, 2001) in corporate
diversification. Our research shows how the inter-organizational environment, as manifest in the
pattern of peer firms’ decisions, continues to influence a firm’s strategy even after it has entered
a market, which in turn leads to the idea that among organizations already present in a market
mimesis continues to drive convergence in organizational strategies and structures (Fligstein,
1985).
This convergence came from our observation that managers fashioned their responses to policy
uncertainty with reference to the actions of peer firms. The overall tendency was for a greater
rate of exit given higher levels of peer exit, but this effect was exacerbated by the level of
political hazards. In nations characterized as politically hazardous, where future policies are
uncertain, firms tend to move in concert to exit a nation. This finding reinforces the idea that
following the herd becomes a more common organizational strategy under conditions of
uncertainty, where that uncertainty stems from a lack of information about the environment.
The strategic implications of these results are that firms that readily crawl into bed with a given
political regime may enjoy a short-term advantage but that gain needs to be balanced against the
long-term costs of maladaptation to, or retribution by, succeeding regimes. Simply following the
31
herd is another strategy that may be used in place of or alongside the development of specific
information on, and ties to, an existing regime. The choice of political risk management
strategies depends on managers’ prior beliefs regarding the stability of the current regime. Where
political hazards are high but the regime appears inherently stable, building strong ties to the
existing regime enhances performance. Where political hazards coincide with regime instability,
however, a more fluid strategy of following the herd will avoid the costs of associating with a
dying regime. While this conclusion may appear somewhat intuitive, our results are the first to
show how subsidiary exit rates vary in a broad sample of countries that differ in the determinants
of policy uncertainty. At the same time, we demonstrate the types of firms and strategies under
which subsidiaries enjoyed lower exit rates, given specific types of policy uncertainty.
Our results identify that the strategies used for contending with policy uncertainty depended on
the nature of the uncertainty. Information based uncertainty could be addressed at one level by
following the actions of peer organizations, and at another level by developing experience to
overcome the information deficiency which is at the source of the uncertainty. For uncertainty
that comes from dynamic change in an environment, imitative and experience-based strategies
provided less benefit to an organization than for the case of information-based uncertainty.
Perhaps, more importantly, experience-based strategies can become a liability in a dynamic
environment, which is a finding that connects to research on the applicability and erosion of
experience over time.
Limitations and Future Research
Similar to research that has identified how the home business context can exert substantial
influences on a firm’s international expansion decisions (Guillén, 2002), we considered only the
32
case of home country competitors. In the international environment, other firms from the home
country are among the most likely to be observed (Martin, Swaminathan, & Mitchell, 1998), and
imitated. An industry is an appropriate defining context (Baum & Mezias, 1992, Delacroix &
Swaminathan, 1991) as the actions of organizations of the same type as a focal organization are
more likely to be observed closely (Haveman, 1993). In focusing on the behavior of peer firms
and on organizational experience, we did not consider firm-specific resources, entry mode choice
(Lu, 2002), subsidiary characteristics, or the identity of joint venture partners as influences on
exit rates given environmental uncertainty. An analysis of these endogenous choices would
necessitate a two-stage selection model that separates the effects of a firm’s characteristics and
its external environment on the strategy choice, from their impact on exit rates (Shaver, 1998).
The absence of a mimetic response in the case of regime instability could indicate that, contrary
to our theoretical arguments, firms are relatively capable of independently discerning the nature
of such a fundamental political transformation and thus do not need to rely upon peer behavior.
Policy uncertainty emanating from political hazards is a complex and ambiguous form of
environmental uncertainty in which many political actors interact to shape a range of future
policies of interest to the firm. When we hold the level of political hazards constant, as we do in
our empirical specification, the potential replacement of the political regime of a host country
with another is a more observable, straightforward and easy to interpret type of change than
policy uncertainty emanating from political hazards. The question of whether a new potential
regime is better or worse than its predecessor may not be one for which managers rely heavily
upon the behavior of peer firms to answer. Another explanation for the lack of support of our
hypothesis revolves around a potential benefit of regime change. If firms well-connected to the
prior regime leave, it enhances the ability of previously poorly-connected firms to become
33
relatively well-connected to the new political regime. This positive substitution effect could
offset the negative information effect leading to the lack of a statistically significant relationship.
Conclusion
We use variation in the determinants of policy uncertainty across national environments to
demonstrate that organizations rely upon cues from their peers and upon organizational
experience to manage policy uncertainty. We demonstrate that imitation is a strong influence in
the decision to exit a country particularly when political hazards are high. We call attention to
organizational experience by demonstrating that firms with relevant experience profiles are
better able to forecast or influence future policy environments and thus enjoy lower exit rates.
These same firms are, however, at a disadvantage in the event of a change in the current political
regime. We argue that these findings point to two strategies for dealing with policy uncertainty:
imitation (following the herd) or the development of specific resources and ties to the current
political regime (sleeping with the enemy). Our study thus highlights the importance for
researchers to carefully define the types of environmental uncertainty that an organization faces
and the factors that influence the relationships between these types of uncertainty and
organizational performance.
34
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40
TABLE 1: Descriptive Statistics and Correlation Matrix
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Measure
Exit
Log (Host country experience, prior
political regimes)
Log (Host country experience, current
political regime)
Percentage of peer subsidiaries that exited
in the prior year
Political Hazards
Regime Instability
Subsidiary age
Firm age
Horizontal business group
Vertical business group
Log (employment)
Other exits by focal firm in rest of world
Other subsidiaries, world
Other subsidiaries, host country
Host country – industry density
Log (Gross Domestic Product)
Log (Population)
Descriptive Statistics
Mean – All Subsidiaries
Mean – Surviving subsidiaries
Mean – Exiting subsidiaries
Standard deviation – All Subsidiaries
Standard deviation – Surviving Subsidiaries
Standard deviation – Exiting Subsidiaries
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
0.01
0.08 -0.08
0.43 0.01 0.10
-0.05
-0.01
0.09
-0.01
-0.02
-0.01
-0.00
0.09
0.00
0.04
0.00
0.07
-0.03
-0.00
0.22
-0.01
0.06
0.05
0.07
0.18
0.11
0.15
0.08
-0.04
0.01
-0.06
-0.12
-0.17
0.32
0.13
0.08
0.14
0.39
0.30
0.47
0.68
0.20
0.22
0.14
-0.07
-0.03
0.10
0.01
-0.01
0.01
0.00
0.07
0.01
0.04
0.00
0.11
-0.03
-0.14
-0.00
0.04
-0.01
0.02
0.05
0.05
0.09
0.10
0.10
-0.83
0.72
-0.03
-0.00
-0.00
0.01
0.02
-0.00
-0.01
-0.10
-0.12
-0.04
-0.13
0.07
-0.01
-0.02
-0.03
0.11
0.02
0.05
0.04
0.03
0.01
0.17
0.03
0.24
0.07
0.14
0.10
-0.05
-0.03
0.04
0.12
0.17
0.06
0.06
0.09
-0.04
0.02
-0.02
0.33
0.24
0.40
0.24
0.05
-0.03
0.04
0.45
0.74
0.50
0.02
-0.05
0.06
0.64
0.41
-0.01
-0.05
0.04
1
0.03
0.00
1.00
0.17
0.00
0.00
2
0.77
0.78
0.53
1.21
1.22
0.89
3
1.82
1.80
2.61
1.48
1.48
1.45
4
0.04
0.03
0.25
0.08
0.06
0.28
5
0.59
0.60
0.50
0.38
0.38
0.37
6
0.18
0.18
0.14
0.50
0.50
0.41
7
2.87
2.85
3.45
2.26
2.27
1.81
8
60.13
60.15
59.46
17.58
17.54
18.68
9
0.28
0.28
0.24
0.45
0.45
0.43
10
0.17
0.17
0.16
0.38
0.38
0.36
11
8.22
8.22
8.19
1.37
1.37
1.38
12
1.29
1.24
2.97
2.82
2.74
4.42
0.70
0.02 0.18
-0.09 -0.02 -0.03
0.11 0.27 0.30 -0.64
13
34.15
34.12
35.02
39.16
39.31
33.96
14
4.33
4.29
5.56
5.74
5.71
6.50
15
31.24
31.26
30.64
37.54
37.47
39.73
16
7.92
7.90
8.55
1.57
1.56
1.65
17
19.07
19.08
18.73
1.70
1.70
1.69
41
TABLE 2* : Policy Uncertainty, Regime Instability and Subsidiary Exit Rates
Variable
Model Model Model Model Model Model Model
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Political Hazards X Log (Host country
0.704
0.702
experience current political regime (H1:<1))
0.004
0.004
Regime instability X Log (Host country
1.285
1.306
experience current political regime (H2a: >1))
0.004
0.003
Log (Host country experience prior political
1.478 1.420 1.462 1.421
regimes (H2b>1))
0.000 0.001 0.000 0.001
Political Hazards X % of peer subsidiaries that
13.355 13.278
exited in the prior year (H3a: >1)
0.002 0.002
Regime instability X % of peer subsidiaries that
1.166 1.430
exited in the prior year (H3b>1)
0.571 0.168
Log (Host country experience current political
1.258 1.163 1.245 1.152
regime)
0.000 0.046 0.002 0.064
Percentage of peer subsidiaries that exited in
99.247 105.08 40.144 40.948
the prior year
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
Political Hazards
0.837 0.724 0.840 0.517 0.620
0.563 0.295 0.583 0.040 0.159
Regime Instability
0.986 0.920 0.847 0.907 0.775
0.886 0.440 0.127 0.453 0.078
Subsidiary age
1.336 1.329 1.210 1.229 1.210 1.221
0.011 0.015 0.128 0.098 0.122 0.101
Subsidiary age2
0.971 0.972 0.984 0.983 0.983 0.983
0.046 0.065 0.305 0.283 0.287 0.276
Firm age
0.954 0.953 0.949 0.951 0.950 0.953
0.005 0.005 0.001 0.001 0.000 0.002
2
Firm age /1000
1.352 1.357 1.382 1.367 1.375 1.356
0.007 0.007 0.001 0.002 0.001 0.002
Horizontal Business Group
0.734 0.704 0.774 0.768 0.790 0.779
0.018 0.010 0.056 0.053 0.076 0.063
Vertical Business Group
1.115 1.126 1.053 1.033 1.064 1.044
0.514 0.487 0.755 0.852 0.705 0.798
Log (Employment)
1.034 1.045 0.997 1.003 0.984 0.989
0.614 0.534 0.958 0.957 0.792 0.858
Other subsidiary exits, rest of world
1.168 1.171 1.125 1.128 1.124 1.127
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
Other subsidiaries, rest of world
0.979 0.978 0.981 0.981 0.982 0.981
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
Other subsidiaries, host country
1.085 1.088 1.055 1.076 1.057 1.078
0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
Host country – industry density
1.002 1.001 1.000 1.006 1.006 1.007 1.007
0.860 0.902 0.994 0.133 0.136 0.069 0.071
Host country – industry density2/1000
0.994 0.998 0.995 0.961 0.964 0.956 0.958
0.800 0.921 0.828 0.085 0.109 0.069 0.063
Log (Gross Domestic Product)
1.260 1.175 1.084 0.969 0.997 0.978 1.003
0.016 0.103 0.490 0.785 0.981 0.847 0.979
Log (Population)
1.023 0.942 0.947 0.997 1.028 1.007 1.030
0.695 0.329 0.468 0.969 0.749 0.934 0.734
N
12206 10147 9831 9831 9831 9831 9831
Log-likelihood
-1319 -1173 -1119 -906.2 -900.5 -899.8 -894.1
* Hazard ratios are reported with p-values in italics. Hazard ratios for region, time and industry indicator variables not reported.
42
FIGURE 1
As Policy Uncertainty Emanating from Political Hazards Increases, Firms with
Experience under the Current Political Regime Have Lower Subsidiary Exit Rates
(Hypothesis 1)
3
Predicted Hazard Ratio
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
Political Hazards
High Experience Under Current Political Regime, No Prior Experience
Low Experience Under Current Political Regime, No Prior Experience
Note: Hazard ratios calculated at mean levels for all other variables.
43
FIGURE 2
As Policy Uncertainty Emanating from Regime Instability Increases, Firms with Experience
Under the Current Political Regime Have Higher Subsidiary Exit Rates (Hypothesis 2a)
Hazard Ratio Multiplier Relative to Figure 1
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
Political Hazards
High Experience Under Current Unstable Regime, No Prior Experience
Low Experience Under Current Unstable Regime, No Prior Experience
Note: Hazard ratios calculated at mean levels for all other variables.
44
FIGURE 3
Firms with Experience Under Previous Political Regimes Have
Higher Subsidiary Exit Rates
(Hypothesis 2b)
Hazard Ratio Multiplier Relative to Figure 1
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
Political Hazards
High Experience Under Current Political Regime and Previous Regimes
Low Experience Under Current Political Regimes, High Experience under Previous Regimes
Note: Hazard ratios calculated at mean levels for all other variables.
45
Figure 4
As Policy Uncertainty Emanating from Political Hazards Increases, Prior Peer Exits Have an
Increasingly Positive Effect on Subsidiary Exit Rates (Hypothesis 3a)
Marginal Effect of Prior Peer Exits on Predicted Hazard
Ratio
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
0%
1%
2%
3%
4%
5%
6%
7%
8%
9%
10% 11% 12% 13% 14% 15% 16% 17% 18% 19% 20%
Percentage of Peer Subisdiaries that Exit in Prior Year
Low Policy Uncertainty
High Policy Uncertainty
Note: Exit rate multiplier calculated as compared to a subsidiary facing no prior exits while at means of all other variables.
46