Shaping of Strategic Behavior: Global Practices of Listing on the US NASDAQ Stock Exchange

Abstract

This article suggests that by explicitly addressing issues of the macro environment, scholars will be better able to understand and predict strategic behavior. A wide range of macro-environmental forces affects firm behavior. Economic factors have been widely discussed in the literature but less attention has been paid to other critical exogenous forces. In particular, the role of wider systems of meaning (shared understandings by a variety of actors) in determining firm activity is largely ignored, although they have been discussed in the organizations literature in a variety of ways. Specifically, we examine the effects of national culture, legal system, political system, and colonial heritage level variables on the equity acquisition process by countries with firms listed on the United States NASDAQ stock exchange from 1991 to 2002. We find that combining perspectives and using variables from the macro-environment allows us to better predict and understand firm strategy.