EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Does religion influence location choice in the hotel industry?

Fernando E. García-Muiña, Ana M. Romero-Martínez and Diala Kabbara

International Business Review, 2020, vol. 29, issue 2

Abstract: Relying on data from the Spanish hotel industry, this paper analyzes the role of informal institutional factors (IIF) in location choice. Earlier studies mostly use an aggregate level of cultural differences as informal institutional factors. We, however, go deeper into this concept and study the impact of two distinct but interrelated informal institutional factors, religion and language, on the location decisions of hotel chains. We resolve the overlapping problem between these two highly correlated IIF by means of a ‘layer’ measurement in Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Our results show that the higher the informal institutional differences (IID), the lower the presence of the hotels in the foreign country. While physical distance plays a key moderating role, formal institutional differences (FID) did not show any effect. We contribute by unravelling the role of language and religion in location choice in the internationalization process of service firms. Moreover, we test the moderating role of formal institutions in these decisions, thus combining the impact of formal and informal institutions on location choices in service firms.

Keywords: Religion; Language; Location choice; Hotel industry; Informal institutional differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969593120300019
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:29:y:2020:i:2:s0969593120300019

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.2020.101663

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 ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:iburev:v:29:y:2020:i:2:s0969593120300019