The economic and institutional context of diversification : a contextual study on antecedents, interdependence and performance implications of international and product diversification / eingereicht von Julia Hautz

• VerfasserIn: Hautz, Julia
• Place / Publishing House: 2010
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Language: English
• Classification: 85.06 - Unternehmensführung
• Physical Description: V, 277 Bl.; graph. Darst.

ger: This study aims to contribute to the understanding on how firms strategically evolve in response to their contextual and institutional environment and consequently clarify the role of the economic and institutional context in shaping the causes and consequences of product and international diversification. Further, this thesis attempts to clarify how a firm's ownership structure impacts on firms' diversification decisions. Thereby, this study shifts the focus from managerial motivations of diversification to those of different ownership types and complements the agency perspective with a more finely grained, institutionally and socially conditioned view of ownership. This study also conceptualizes the direct simultaneous relationship between product and international diversification and recognizes the endogeneity of these two interdependent strategic choices. In contrast to previous research, this approach provides a more reliable clarification in addressing the questions whether these strategies represent complements or supplements. Finally, the integrative approach of this study offers the opportunity to derive unbiased estimations of the joint impact of product and international diversification on firm performance. An empirical analysis testing these developed propositions is provided based on a uniquely detailed panel dataset on a contextual setting different from the US context from most previous studies. This study, in contrast, examines European industrial firms over a time period of 15 years between 1993 and 2007. Europe's three largest economies, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, provide an excellent setting for an investigation of the role of contextual economic and institutional factors as well as ownership structure on firm diversification strategies and their performance implications.