Abstract

This study seeks to revalidate existing research insights on the relationship between internationalization and firm performance and to examine the role of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) as a potential moderator to this relationship. The research uses a longitudinal database of US-listed manufacturing companies over the period 2000-19. It employs a foreign market penetration-based construct as well as a foreign production-based construct of internationalization and uses a fixed effects linear regression model for the analysis.

The study suggests that the relationship between foreign market penetration-based internationalization and firm performance shows a declining trend over the past two decades. This may not be a negation of the generally accepted relationship (inverted-U or S-shaped) but a reflection of the data set used and the economic conditions of the study period. The trend towards co-movement of global business cycles has eroded the benefits of internationalization while factors like protectionism and political and foreign currency risk continue to create challenges for diversified firms. Foreign Production based internationalization, on the other hand, does not have a significant relationship with firm performance.

Further, the GFC negatively moderated the relationship in the case of Foreign Market Penetration based internationalization. This could be due to heightened protectionism, increased complexity and cost pressures induced by the crisis. The moderation impact of the GFC in the case of Foreign Production was not significant. This can be attributed to the fact that the strong negative effects mentioned above were attenuated by the benefits of strong subsidiary linkages (i.e. financial support as well as internal markets in the case of vertical linkages.)

Finally, and drawing from these points, the study also suggested that the negative moderation impact of the GFC on firm performance was stronger in the case of foreign market penetration-based internationalization than in the case of foreign production -based internationalization.