"Resource Dependence, Macro Contexts, and Cross-border M&As by Emerging Market Multinationals"

Resource dependence theory (RDT) has become one of the dominant theoretical rationales explaining why firms acquire other firms, however, there does not exist any substantial cross-national study invoking RDT explicitly investigating acquisition relationships between emerging market multinationals (EMNCs) and advanced economies. By responding to recent calls to explore the drivers of cross-border M&As by EMNCs in advanced countries and the conditions that make EMNCs achieve resource independence more likely, we made a fine-grained conceptualization of RDT into two dimensions: RDT of constraint absorption and environmental complexity. By building on and extending the two tenets of RDT, we elaborate the moderating effects of both home and host country contexts on the relationship between resource dependence and overseas acquisitions by EMNCs in advanced economies. Our empirical results based on a large panel dataset of EMNC cross-border M&As in advanced countries highlight contextual influences of national ...