"Corporate ownership and internationalisation: the effects of family, bank and institutional investor ownership in the UK and in Continental Europe". Proceedings of the 38th AIB-UKI Conference

Research problem and theoretical framework While the role of corporate governance has been increasingly analysed during recent years, it is only very recently that the effects of corporate governance features on firm international strategies have been also considered. Really, in their classical version neither TC economics nor the RBV consider the ownership type as a determinant of overall firm internationalisation. According to TC theory, the level of internationalisation is the result of the assessment of the costs and the benefits of coordinating international transactions internally by the management relative to those incurred through external coordination via the market. From the RBV perspective, a key driver of the diversification process is the existence of excess capacity, either of physical assets or knowledge, and one strategy through which the firm can exploit these underused resources is by entering foreign markets. Aim of research We consider the potential role played by different kind of shareholders among the determinants of firm international level. The objective of this quantitative paper is twofold. First, using a European sample of listed firms, we intend to assess if and how different shareholders typologies affect the firms’ degree of internationalisation. Second, distinguishing between the firms quoted in the UK from those listed in countries of Continental Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain) we intend to investigate if the different characteristics of the corporate governance systems in the two regions have any impact on firms’ internationalisation levels. Main findings Overall our results confirm that different kind of ownerships affect with different degree of intensity the overall level of firm’s multinationality. First, we find that family ownership lead to lower international diversification levels. Second, our results show that the effects of ownership over firm’s international strategies depend also on the context of analysis. Our findings suggest that the attitude towards internationalisation of financial institutional investors can differ sharply when the corporate governance rules and habits are different. While in the Continental Europe context, bank ownership negatively affects the level of internationalisation our result show that in an Anglo-Saxon context institutional investors promote internationalisation.