دانلود رایگان مقاله آیا شرکت های کوچک و متوسط با صاحبان تازه وارد صادرکنندگانی استثنایی هستند؟

ABSTRACT

Immigrant owners possess valuable human and social capital from which small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) might derive advantages when internationalizing. According to this resource-based perspective, such advantages might be manifested in immigrant-owned SMEs' enhanced ability to identify, evaluate, develop and exploit opportunities in international markets. However, a cognitive perspective offers an opposing view: insofar as immigrant owners are more prone to overconfidence than their non-immigrant counterparts when making internationalization decisions, immigrant-owned SMEs might reap less financial rewards from potentially high-risk international markets. We pit the two perspectives against each other theoretically and empirically by evaluating a) the relationship between business owners' immigrant background and SMEs' export intensity, and b) the extent to which such background moderates the relationship between SMEs' export intensity and (risk-adjusted) financial performance. Based on a representative sample of 9977 Canadian SMEs, we find that the presence of immigrant owners positively impacts export intensity, but negatively moderates the relationship between export intensity and financial performance. We interpret this evidence, combined with supplementary analyses, as support for a cognitive theory of international entrepreneurship in general, and particularly in relation to the role and consequences of entrepreneurs' immigrant background.

7. Conclusion

Our study was motivated by a search for a definitive answer to the following question: Are SMEs with immigrant owners exceptional exporters? Although it provides evidence that immigrant-owned SMEs can export more intensively than other SMEs under apparently more risky conditions, it also reveals that they tend to generate and capture less value than others from doing so. One answer to this performance puzzle can be found in a cognitive perspective that clarifies why immigrant entrepreneurs may not become exceptional exporters despite their relative advantages. As it turns out, such advantages can be a double-edged sword: they could equip immigrant entrepreneurs to outperform others as exporters, and simultaneously hurt them by inducing a counterproductive cognitive bias in the form of overconfidence. Our findings generally support the view that accentuated overconfidence among immigrant owners is a major contributing factor in their relative underperformance as exporters. Specifically, they seem more predisposed than their non-immigrant counterparts to take on what seems to be excessively risky export activity with disappointing financial results. Accordingly, our study suggests that international entrepreneurship scholars should pay more attention to the interplay between the positive and negative cognitive dimensions of an immigrant background; and thus help immigrant entrepreneurs become more aware of potential overconfidence biases, and their consequences.