Mapping the institutional capital of high-tech firms: A fuzzy-set analysis of capitalist variety and export performance

• 成果类型: Review
• 署名作者: Schneider, Martin R.; Schulze-Bentrop, Conrad; Paunescu, Mihai
• 署名单位: University of Paderborn; SAS Institute Inc
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2506
• DOI: 10.1057/jibs.2009.36
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 246-266
• 关键词: comparative advantage; capitalism; institutional context; Qualitative comparative analysis

摘要

We examine how institutional configurations, not single institutions, provide companies with institutional capital. Building on the varieties-of-capitalism approach, it is argued that competitive advantage in high-tech industries with radical innovation may be supported by combinations of certain institutional conditions: lax employment protection, weak collective bargaining coverage, extensive university training, little occupational training, and a large stock market. Furthermore, multinational enterprises engage in institutional arbitrage'': they allocate their activities so as to benefit from available institutional capital. These hypotheses are tested on country-level data for 19 OECD economies in the period 1990 to 2003. A fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis yields several interesting findings. A high share of university graduates and a large stock market are complementary institutions leading to strong export performance in high-tech. Employment protection is neither conducive nor harmful to export performance in high-tech. A high volume of cross-border mergers and acquisitions, as a form of institutional arbitrage leading to knowledge flows, acts as a functional equivalent to institutions that support knowledge production in the home economy. Implications of these findings for theory, policy, and the analysis of firm-level behavior are developed. Journal of International Business Studies (2010) 41, 246-266. doi:10.1057/jibs.2009.36