Extending the literature on institutional voids, we introduce theory from law that highlights the ability of firms to choose the laws and enforcement mechanisms that govern their international joint ventures (IJVs). Specifically, firms may overcome institutional voids by borrowing institutions via binding international commercial arbitration (BICA) rather than relying on host-market institutions. Leveraging an institution-based view, we develop a theoretical framework to articulate the conditions under which IJV partners may choose BICA as opposed to domestic courts to overcome institutional voids in host markets.

To test whether firms behave consistently with international law prohibiting anonymous incorporation, we conducted a global audit study and field experiment, using data from 1639 incorporation firms in 176 countries. We requested anonymous incorporation and randomly assigned references to international law, threat of penalties, norms of appropriate behavior, or a placebo. We find a substantial number of firms willing to flout international standards and show that those in OECD countries proved significantly less compliant with rules than in developing countries or tax havens. Firms in tax havens displayed significantly greater compliance and were sensitive to experimental interventions invoking international law.

International organizations, ranging from large MNCs to small born global firms, are increasingly recognizing that multicultural employees can help them operate across countries and across cultures. However, multiculturals – individuals who identify with and internalize more than one culture – are a diverse group, and organizations seeking to leverage their potential can benefit from a deeper understanding of the resources they possess and the challenges they face. We conducted three studies with a total of 1196 participants to test relationships between multicultural identity patterns and personal, social and task outcomes. Consistent results across studies indicated that individuals with more cultural identities (higher identity plurality) had more social capital and higher levels of intercultural skills than those with fewer cultural identities, while individuals who integrated their cultural identities (higher identity integration) experienced higher levels of personal well-being than those who separated them. Based on these results we advocate for two directions in future research on multicultural employees: moving beyond cognitive mechanisms alone, and examining monocultural and multicultural individuals simultaneously along the spectrum of identity plurality.

It is well known that firm-level corporate governance practices vary mainly between rather than within countries, but country-level factors such as legal and financial institutions explain less than 50% of this cross-country variation. In this article we show that two dimensions of national culture – individualism and uncertainty avoidance – capture about 90% of the country fixed effects and outperform the country-level explanatory variables used in prior literature. We argue that culture works through a tradeoff between managerial expertise and certainty of control, a tradeoff largely overlooked by prior literature, that captures a country’s preference for the Anglo-Saxon approach versus the direct control approach for governance. Consistent with this argument, we find that the effect of culture on corporate governance varies across firms with different needs for managerial expertise and certainty of control. We also find that culture interacts with other factors to determine firm-level governance.