We explore how bribing at home affects firms’ ability to appropriate value from their exporting activities. We argue that bribing diverts attention from the information gained in export markets. We expect that firms with bribing experience at home enjoy fewer productivity gains from exporting but less so in countries with higher formal institutional trust. Our analyses based on data from various Sub-Saharan African countries support our hypotheses. In sum, we suggest that bribing can be regarded as a fee that raises the general costs of doing business and thereby crowds out (part of) the resources needed to exploit foreign knowledge gained through exporting. We contribute with theoretical and policy implications.

Paying corporate taxes is crucial to the development of a country. Increasingly, stakeholders advocate for morally responsible tax practices. While existing literature acknowledges the ethical contribution of tax payments and criticizes unethical tax evasion and avoidance practices, little research examines the combined effect of internal and external factors shaping firms’ perceptions, especially those with informal legacies. This study explores whether the informal legacy impacts firms’ perceptions of corporate taxation’s ethicality. Based on organizational imprinting theory, we argue that non-compliance of tax experience is structurally and cognitively embedded in informal firms, influencing their taxation perceptions even after formalization. We also analyze owner-managers’ role, corrupt business environments, and peer tax compliance in shaping firms’ perceptions of tax ethicality. We find that firms with an informal legacy view regular tax payments as less beneficial to societal development than firms that started formally. Moreover, the presence of owner-managers and higher levels of corruption in the operating environment exacerbated this diminished perception of tax ethicality. However, peer tax compliance mitigates this effect, reversing the negative perception of tax ethicality to a positive one. This research enhances our understanding of informality’s influence on a firm’s ethical behaviour and on factors driving informal imprint persistence and transformation.

A great number of firms internationalize with the help of standardized export promotion services provided by governments. Research on such assistance is nevertheless primarily empirical and typically focuses on a specific country or support program. Attempts to establish links to other research contexts are rare. In this conceptual paper, I expand the topic by discussing three propositions that introduce some rarely discussed aspects relevant government export support and to the policymaking capability of government agencies. Specifically, I explore and illustrate the implications of time aspects and the evolutionary buildup of routines in firms and agencies, which create a need for various types of export support services. I also challenge the assumption made by many empirical studies that the efficient use of public funds can be evaluated by simple intervention-performance relationship tests and discuss the relationship between government agencies and beneficiary firms from the perspective of ex-post decision accuracy (true positive; true negative; type 1, or leakage, error; and type 2, or exclusion, error).

A stream of literature has cultivated a theoretical lens of institutional escapism to explain the internationalisation of emerging-markets multinational enterprises (EMNEs), especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Yet, this literature remains in its infancy and deserves further development. In this paper, we study regional institutions of marketisation and financial market openness, as well as firms’ political connections and ties to industry associations. We contend that a developed marketisation, open financial markets, political connections, and ties to industry associations negatively affect the level of Chinese SMEs' OFDI. The analysis of 242 Chinese private SMEs' OFDI activities from 2009 to 2019 provides empirical evidence for our arguments. We contribute by adding knowledge to the "escape" view of EMNEs’ internationalisation, offering novelty through highlighting the role of ties to industry associations, and enriching the literature on the relationship between institutional ties and EMNEs’ internationalization.