Internationalisation and its determinants: a hierarchical approach

This study builds a hierarchical model to examine how country-level institutional dimensions impact the resource-based aspects on the internationalisation by early stage entrepreneurial firms. It combines the resource-based theory and the institutional theory to develop a model of internationalisation and empirically tests this model on a representative sample of nascent entrepreneurs using a hierarchical estimation design. By combining multiple datasets, cross-level (random-effects) moderation analysis is used to explicate the influence of a country’s institution on the effects of the resource-based determinants on the internationalisation by early stage entrepreneurial firms, and this method enables the study of country-level growth slopes. The results of the empirical research confirm the role of resource-based explanatory variables in predicting internationalisation and the positive moderating effect of institutions on this association, suggesting that along with the motivational factors emphasised by the resource-based theory, it is important not to underestimate the role of the institutional system in shaping the propensity and intensity of export activity