No place like home? How EMNCs from hyper turbulent contexts internationalize by sequentially arbitraging rents, values, and scales abroad

Abstract

Combining historical and longitudinal comparative case methodologies for nine nascent EMNCs over 12 years, we explain how their evolving relationship to a hyper turbulent home country motivates largely unplanned yet aggressive internationalization. Firms progressively mitigate the damaging effects of their rapidly deteriorating home context by pursuing a sequence of three institutional arbitrage modes. They first arbitrage rents to stabilize their rocky domestic operations, then arbitrage values to safeguard their threatened core identity, and finally arbitrage scales to transcend their limited growth prospects. The induced stepwise process of internationalization yields similar patterns for purely domestic firms, exporters, and foreign direct investors.