Essays on location strategies, institutional environments, and knowledge/resource management

The overarching question of this dissertation is: How do multinational corporations (MNCs) choose their locations and make investment decisions, considering both their internal structures and the external environments at local, regional, and international levels? This dissertation comprises three empirical essays that explore the relationship between firms’ investment location strategies and institutional environments at different geographic levels: subnational and supranational levels. Essay 1 investigates how international economic agreements (i.e., multilateral, regional, and bilateral economic agreements) differ in enhancing cross-border transactions, finding that regional economic agreements are more effective, especially in high-risk host countries. Essay 2 theorizes that multinationality—defined as the geographic dispersion of resource assets across countries—as an internal sourcing mechanism that reduces the likelihood of MNCs entering industry clusters, particularly when in-network resources have greater cross-border transferability. Essay 3 examines how MNCs interpret the prior cluster entry behavior of foreign industry peers as information cues to guide their own foreign investment decisions in industry clusters, with peer signals being especially strong in high-tech industries where resource access uncertainty is more critical. To sum up, my entire dissertation enhances our understanding of how firms navigate and respond to diverse institutional environments to inform their location and investment strategies.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Business Administration

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Huang, Der-Ting

Contributors dc:contributor

• Clougherty, Joseph A.
• Clougherty, Joseph A
• Mahoney, Joseph T
• Yao, Fiona Kun
• Kim, Min Jung

• Multinational Corporations (mncs)
• Institutional Environments
• Resource Management
• Transaction Cost Economics (tce)

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Der-Ting Huang

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/130153

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F130153