Fernando Merino

Family SMEs' Internationalization: Disentangling the Influence of Familiness on Spanish Firms' Export Activity

This paper studies the relationships between family involvement and internationalization of family small and medium enterprises (), examining the effects exerted by the three main dimensions that comprise the concept of familiness: power, experience, and culture. Disentangling the influence of familiness dimensions lead us to discover the combined effects of familys governance, generation, and culture on export activity. The results, using the ‐ scale over a sample of 500 Spanish firms, show that this multidimensional approach better identifies the determinants of the family internationalization. Specifically, we find that the family experience and its culture orientation positively affect the firms export activity, whereas family governance/management does not have any significant influence.

Firms’ productivity and internationalization: a statistical dominance test

The literature on firms internationalization establishes a direct relationship between productivity and foreign activities. This paper extends the usual tests on this relationship in two areas: first, it distinguishes the main stages in the internationalization process (multinationals and exporters); second, as tests of difference of means may be insufficient, statistical dominance tests of the productivity distribution have been formulated.

Relatedness of decisions in business services outsourcing

The literature of service outsourcing is mainly focused on case studies or specific service activities. However, there is no evidence about the pattern of relatedness among outsourcing of services. This paper analyses this issue by a relatedness index previously applied in the framework of product and technological diversification. The index is applied to analyse the degree of relatedness for outsourcing decisions among an array of fourteen services in a large data set of Spanish manufacturers in 1990–2006, detecting four time-constant clusters. An econometric analysis tests the alternative explanations about this pattern of joint decisions, based on shared knowledge and on workers expertise.

Capital Structure of Foreign Affiliates and the Investment Decision: Two Questions to Consider

This paper analyses the ownership structure of foreign affiliates of Spanish firms. In contrast to previous studies on the participation degree, the paper highlights the importance of the previous decision to invest abroad. To do so, an econometric model with a limited dependent variable helps to show that to ignore the previous decision modifies the conclusions of the empirical analyses that raise an empirical model over a sample of firms with foreign affiliates. Additionally, the paper analyses in detail the importance of the cultural and political-legal differences between home and host countries that justify a different type of participation in equity of foreign affiliates. A clear implication for future research in this field is the need to reconsider the econometric approach to include the investment decision. As the paper has shown, a double-hurdle model provides notably different results than the usual approaches, which in this case are closer to the theoretical literature insights.