A review of the internationalization of state-owned firms and sovereign wealth funds: Governments' nonbusiness objectives and discreet power

We review and bridge the literature on the internationalization of state-owned firms and sovereign wealth funds to provide a novel understanding of how government ownership affects foreign investments in three ways. First, we explain how state-owned firms and funds behave differently from private ones because they need to balance governments' nonbusiness objectives and firms' business goals. This results in competing predictions on whether government ownership helps or hinders internationalization due to particular nonbusiness objectives. Second, building on the review, we provide suggestions on how to extend research topics and theories of the firm by incorporating these nonbusiness objectives in the internationalization decisions in four areas: home government's endowments, characteristics, and attitudes; host-country expansion's support, influence, and impact; home- and host-country relationship conflicts, mediation, and disguising; and management's orientation, opacity, and arbitrage. Third, we capture how governments may use state-owned multinationals and sovereign wealth funds to nudge host-country governments by introducing the concept of discreet power and the use of four strategies (recognition, values, development, and supremacy) to achieve it. This helps to outline the beginning of a unified approach to how governments use their foreign investments to achieve nonbusiness goals.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1057/s41267-022-00522-w.

The dark side of globalization: Evidence from the impact of COVID-19 on multinational companies

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to economic and health crises ("twin crises") worldwide. Using a sample of firms from 73 countries over the period January to December 2020, we examine stock price reactions of multinational corporations (MNCs) and purely domestic companies (DCs) to the crisis. We find that, on average, MNCs suffer a significantly larger decline in firm value relative to DCs during the stock market crisis caused by the pandemic with notable heterogeneity in this underperformance across both industry and region. The evidence of MNC underperformance is robust to using abnormal returns, an alternative crisis window, a matched sample that accounts for differences in characteristics between MNCs and DCs, alternative model specifications, and alternative proxies for multinationality. Further analysis on the effect of government responses on the valuation gap suggests that stringent government responses exacerbate MNCs' underperformance. Finally, we show that a stronger financial system mitigates negative crisis returns, especially under stringent government responses, while real factors, such as the firm's supply chain, investments in human capital, research and development, exacerbate negative crisis returns. Our findings have important implications for managers of MNCs and government policymakers alike and contribute to studies on the international diversification-performance relation by demonstrating a dark side of globalization during a tail-risk event.