The Influence of Institutional Experience on Foreign Subsidiary Exit of Korean MNEs: Focus on Regulatory and Normative Dimensions

Research in the international business literature has long contended that the accumulated experience of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in a host country context leads to success in foreign markets. Despite advances in understanding of the relationship between experience and firm success, recent studies suggest that the accumulation of related experience does not always translate into a positive performance outcome for foreign direct investments. According to this research stream, we explore the idea that learning from experience backfires at some point and learning discounts then occur. To this end, this study develops a measure of institutional experience and examines whether and when knowledge acquired via learning from institutional experience exhibits depreciation. We also categorize institutional experience into regulatory experience and normative experience and identify their learning discount points. We conduct Cox proportional hazard regression analysis to estimate the hazard rate of an event's occurrence. In this study, the event is an exit of a subsidiary and the hazard rate of exit is the probability that a subsidiary will exit at a particular time. Our results, based on a dataset of FDIs by South Korean MNEs between 2007 and 2016, show that (a) there is a U-shaped relationship between related institutional experience and subsidiary exit rates and (b) the turning point of subsidiary exit rates occurs earlier in the accumulation of related regulatory experience than in the accumulation of related normative experience.