Measuring the diversification benefits of investing in highly internationalised firms

Jenny Berrill, Colm Kearney and O’Hagan-Luff, Martha

International Business Review, 2019, vol. 28, issue 4, 672-684

Abstract: A vast literature exists investigating if Multinational Companies (MNCs) provide indirect international exposure to investors. These studies produce mixed results. Unlike previous studies, we distinguish between various types of MNCs, in particular firms that are consistently international versus firms that are in the process of internationalising. We provide a unique longitudinal dataset of firm-level multinationality of 396 Russell 1000 firms between 1996 and 2010, and estimate the diversification benefits of investing in these firms using mean variance spanning and Sharpe ratio tests. We find that the most consistently international firms provide the greatest diversification benefits. Rapidly internationalising firms provide little benefit, suggesting that the costs of rapid firm-level internationalisation are substantial. This distinction between firms at differing stages of internationalisation adds to the debate on the benefits of investing in MNCs and provides a possible explanation to the conflicting findings in the literature.

Keywords: Multinational companies (MNCs); Mean-variance spanning; Firm-level internationalisation; Rapidly internationalising firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969593118301227
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iburev:v:28:y:2019:i:4:p:672-684

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/133/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... me/133/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.ibusrev.2019.01.005

Access Statistics for this article

International Business Review is currently edited by P. Ghauri

More articles in International Business Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().