Unfavorable Market Conditions, Institutional and Financial Development, and Exits of Foreign Subsidiaries

In this paper, we examine how market conditions in host countries affect the entry and exit decisions of multinational corporations' foreign subsidiaries. Taking the real options perspective, we expect that smaller investments will be associated with more flexible entries and exits. We also predict that better-established host countries with greater institutional and financial development will facilitate the exits of foreign subsidiaries with smaller investments under unfavorable market conditions. We run a Cox proportional hazard rate model with a dataset of Korean foreign direct investments, and find that when market conditions become more unfavorable, foreign subsidiaries making smaller investments that were endogenously chosen under the influence of market demand uncertainty are more likely to engage in earlier exits than subsidiaries making larger investments. We also find that strong institutional and financial development positively moderates small subsidiaries' exits under conditions of unfavorably resolved uncertainty.