Research on corporate unbundling: A synthesis

Unbundling operations, understood as the parent company's disposal and sale of assets, facilities, product lines, subsidiaries, divisions and business units, are emerging as a central topic of research in several areas. Yet a synthesis is still lacking, and differences in the terminology have created confusion. This paper stimulates and facilitates future research by unpacking the nature of unbundling operations. We suggest that outcomes of unbundling may be mediated by variables, such as factors at process and management level, which have been greatly neglected in existing research. The paper builds a framework on antecedents, process and outcomes of unbundling by integrating empirical findings and theoretical contributions. Furthermore, it identifies gaps in the existing literature and offers suggestions for future research on unbundling.Corporate strategy; restructuring; divestiture; divestment;

The European M&A industry: Trends, patterns and shortcomings

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the process of European mergers and acquisitions. We characterize the main features of M&A activity in Europe in the period 2001-2007. We review the process of M&A regulatory integration and patterns of activity. Most European M&As still take place among domestic firms, although cross-border transactions are larger in value and have been slightly increasing, especially in regulated industries. Transactions are likely to be friendly, partially negotiated via public tender offers and private deals, and paid in cash, especially for smaller deals. Competing bids are still fairly rare and less likely to be completed. Target shareholders obtain an average premium of around 20% and this premium is slightly declining with deal size. Regulatory differences are large, particularly in the application of takeover regulations, and uncertainty persists in the predictability of the national regulatory agencies.European cross-border; domestic merger; acquisitions; M&A trends;

ARE STRATEGY RESEARCHERS WORSE STRATEGY TEACHERS IN BUSINESS SCHOOLS?

In this study we examine whether in business schools a professor’s research quality impacts her performance in the classroom. We build a novel dataset of students’ teaching evaluations of 922 strategic management courses in a top-ranked business school in Spain in the period 2011-2016 linking it to the publication outcome of each professor. We find a significant positive association between research quality measured by the sum of the number of publications in a six-year interval and students’ evaluations of teaching. Specifically, we find that an increase of two standard deviations on our variable of research quality is associated to an increase in students’ evaluations equivalent to the jump from being a median professor to being in the top quartile of best performers in class. Moreover, we find that a professor with four publications in a six year period increases the likelihood of her students choosing strategy elective courses up to 21.5 percent. We also find a positive and strongly significant interaction of research quality with course length, suggesting that the benefits of research may emerge specifically in longer courses. These findings extend the current discourse on the impact of research on teaching to strategic management courses in business schools

Why do some multinational firms respond better than others to the hostility of host governments? Proximal embedding and the side effects of local partnerships

Using a multiple-case study of alleged expropriations reported before the World Bank, we examine how multinational companies (MNC) react to the escalating hostility of host governments. Our study reveals how different choices regarding the interaction with local nonmarket stakeholders – which we refer to as proximal vs. mediated embedding – shape how managers respond to these disputes by affecting their ability to collect, process and interpret information, and to act upon it in a way that effectively mobilizes local and international support. In contrast to the prevailing view that local partners in international joint ventures shelter MNCs from abuse from political authorities, our findings show that primary reliance on local partners to manage the local nonmarket environment can actually reinforce a liability of outsidership and even create a ‘liability of insidership’, to the extent that relying on local partners prevents the MNC from establishing quality connections with a broad range of nonmarket stakeholders, reducing its alertness and responsiveness to hostile acts from host governments

Three decades of subsidiary exits: Parent firm financial performance and moderators

This study aimed to find important constructs and relationships among models of subsidiary divestment during the period from 1989 to 2018 using correlation matrices of 80 studies, the selection of which was based on six criteria. It revealed eight important constructs, namely firm innovativeness, environmental factors in the target country, type of experience, organizational characteristics, investment strategy, parent firm financial performance, subsidiary divestment, and the moderating effects of advertising intensity and product diversification. Furthermore, it shed light on seven relationships that should be considered in future attempts to assess parent performance related to its antecedents and subsidiary divestment. Moreover, advertising intensity and product diversification were respectively weakening and strengthening moderators on firm financial performance, and advertising intensity was a weakening moderator between organizational characteristics and subsidiary divestment. The implementation of a product diversification policy did not assist in preventing subsidiary divestment. Conclusions, implications, limitations, and future research are discussed

A unified theory of forward‐ and backward‐looking M&As and divestitures

In a unified theory of forward-and backward-looking M&As and divestitures, an M&A today may be a cause for a divestiture in the future; conversely a divestiture today may be a consequence of an M&A in the past. M&As and divestitures are not only two sides of the same coin, they are also causes and consequences of each other. In this paper, in a two-period model, two firms consider integrating or separating in each period. We analyze forward-and backward-looking M&As and divestitures, and compare them with static M&As and divestitures