Anne Jacqueminet Awarded at AIB Annual Conference
Anne Jacqueminet, Assistant Professor at Bocconi Department of Management and Technology, together with Joao Albino-Pimentel (Copenhagen Business School) received the Alan M. Rugman Young Scholar Award for their paper ''The Role of Environmental Considerations in International Acquisition Performance: A Configurational Perspective''.
The Alan M. Rugman Young Scholar Award is given out every year to the best paper on aspects of international business, written by authors under 40 years, which have been accepted for presentation at the Academy of International Business (AIB) Annual Conference through a double-blind-review process, i.e. a review process in which neither authors nor reviewers know each other's names.
AIB, a premier global community of international business scholars, was founded with the objective of promoting impactful research, improving business education and practice, and collaborating with leaders in policy and interdisciplinary research.
The award-winning paper shed light on whether stock markets would react positively or negatively to international acquisitions of clean environmental targets, since there are some contrasting arguments in the literature. On the one hand, some suggest that stocks markets may punish environmental investments, because they are perceived as a waste of resources. On the other hand, there is also evidence that markets value firms' environmental responsibility.
After analyzing 93 international acquisition deals by 46 French multinationals over 2007-2017 thanks to a fuzzy-set QCA approach, the results show that markets react positively to deals that correspond to learning and transfer strategies. A learning strategy corresponds to the acquisition by a firm with low technical capabilities of a clean target, and a transfer strategy corresponds to the acquisition by a firm with high technical capabilities of a highly polluting target.
Moreover, there is also a positive reaction to environmental leadership strategies (high capabilities/clean target) if they take place in a country where regulations are strict and the firm has strong stakeholder engagement capabilities, as markets value strategic fit. By contrast, these strategies can trigger negative reactions if they are not required by a strict regulatory context in the host country, because they are perceived as a waste of resources by stockholders.
Besides, markets react negatively to deals that correspond to institutional arbitrage, i.e. deals that involve a company with low technical capabilities but high political capabilities acquiring a dirty target in a country with lax regulation.