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Der-Ting Huang

PhD Candidate, Gies College of Business

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Research Agenda

I am interested in studying multi-business, multi-unit firms, particularly examining how firms manage and allocate resources in relation to their location and investment strategies and their external environments. My research agenda addresses this overarching question: How do firms choose their locations and make investment decisions, considering both their internal structures and the external environments at local, regional, and international levels? I embrace the spirit of muti-level analysis, emphasizing how firms’ business activities respond to the broader institutional context in which they are embedded.

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​Across my research projects, I have examined (1) how firms choose their locations and make investment decisions in external environments at local and international levels (*dissertation essays), and (2) how firms adjust their investment strategies in response to competitive pressure at the industry level.

Dissertation

Essays on Location Strategies, Institutional Environments, and Knowledge/Resource Management

​​Across dissertation chapters, I explore the relationship between firms’ investment location strategies and institutional environments at different geographic levels: subnational and international levels. In my first chapter, I investigate whether multinational corporations (MNCs) will make foreign investment decisions in industry clusters when operating in a host country. Particularly, I emphasize the role of MNCs' geographic dispersion of resource access in their decisions. In my second chapter, I investigate how international economic agreements—multilateral, regional, and bilateral economic agreements—differ in enhancing cross-border transactions. I highlight the inherent size and geographic scope of member countries involved in international agreements as important ex-ante contractual features that explain the variations among these agreements in enhancing cross-border business activities. To sum up, my entire dissertation enhances our understanding of how firms navigate and respond to diverse institutional environments when making their location and investment decisions.

 

​My dissertation has won several dissertation grants and awards:

Job Market Paper

To Enter or Not to Enter Clusters? Navigating Multinational Corporations' Dispersed Resources in Foreign Investment Locations 

(**Dissertation chapter; Working Paper)

Der-Ting Huang

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ABSTRACT

 

This study investigates how multinationality shapes international firms' investment decisions regarding whether to enter industry clusters when operating in a host country. This paper reveals alternative approaches multinational corporations (MNCs) can take to manage resource allocation when making investments in host countries. I introduce multinationality—defined as the geographic dispersion of resource assets across countries—as an internal sourcing mechanism that reduces MNCs’ likelihood to join industry clusters. I unpack the efficacy of internal sourcing mechanisms based on the cross-border transferability of MNCs’ different in-network resources—knowledge/technology, intermediate inputs, and service skills, by decomposing different resource dimensions of multinationality to R&D, manufacturing, and service multinationality. Using data on MNCs’ foreign investments in the United States from 2004 to 2020, the findings from logit models show that the degree of an MNC’s overall multinationality reduces the likelihood of the MNC to choose clusters when operating in a host country. Moreover, it is revealed that an MNC’s R&D multinationality represents the strongest substitutability, followed by its service multinationality and manufacturing multinationality, respectively. In essence, this paper provides a more comprehensive understanding of MNC location strategies.

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Papers Under Review

Rivalry among Multinational Corporations in Corporate Social Responsibility 

(Working paper; *Title adjusted for anonymity due to review process)

Der-Ting Huang & Fiona Kun Yao

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  • ​Under Review, Academy of Management Journal

ABSTRACT This paper extends the competitive dynamics literature by exploring rivalry between multinational corporations (MNCs) in nonmarket arenas. Specifically, our study explores how an increase in the level of a rival’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a competitive response by a focal MNC regarding its CSR practice. We develop a contingency view by investigating how two boundary conditions—observability and coordination in global markets—moderate the competitive interactions between the rival and the focal MNC in CSR. We empirically test our hypotheses with 3091 dyad-year observations across 35 host countries from 2010 to 2015, and the results corroborate our theoretical arguments.

Trade and Investment in a Regional World: The Asymmetric Effects of Multilateral, Regional, and Bilateral Economic Agreements

(**Dissertation chapter; Working Paper; *Title adjusted for anonymity due to review process)

Der-Ting Huang

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  • Under Review, International Business Review

  • Supported by the TOP Grant for Dissertation, National Science and Technology Council of ROC (Taiwan), 2023 

ABSTRACT International economic agreements—classified as multilateral, regional, and bilateral economic agreements—mitigate institutional barriers for firms that engage in cross-border business. Such agreements facilitate cross-border business by providing safeguards, but variations in their safeguarding quality are evident. Building on new institutional economics and regionalization literature, this paper brings the regional dimension into institutional analysis, suggesting that regional agreements are higher quality than other types. This paper theorizes that regional economic agreements involve greater safeguarding advantages regarding enhancing trade and FDI compared to multilateral and bilateral economic agreements. It also compares the relative strengths of regional economic agreements, with stronger effects for cross-border businesses in high-risk than in low-risk countries. Using panel data on trade and FDI relationships in Asia from 2000 to 2016, results corroborate the hypotheses, highlighting that regional agreements define regional borders that matter to foreign transactions, which contributes to research on the nexus between regions and international business.

Work-in-Progress

Globalization and Populism: A Case of East Asia (Work-in-progress)

 

Der-Ting Huang

Stage: Empirical paper; Refining manuscript stage

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between globalization and populism. Specifically, I investigate how the signing of a trade agreement (i.e., the globalization shock) leads to a change in domestic perceptions of threat from the trading partner and in political conservatism within the home country. I decompose domestic perceptions of threat from the trading partner into two types: (1) perceived threat from the trading partner to the home government and (2) perceived threat from the trading partner to the domestic citizens. I conduct an interrupted time-series analysis on the bilateral relationship in East Asia between 2000 and 2017. The results indicate that following the signing of the bilateral trade agreement, there is an increase in the perceived threat to the home government, but a decrease in the perceived threat to domestic citizens. Additionally, there is a rise in political conservatism in the home country following the signing of the agreement. This study thus suggests that national concerns about globalization primarily stem from domestic fears of threat from the trading partner to their national government rather than to the individuals.

Towards a Theory of Managing Geographically Dispersed Activities as a Source of Firms' Superior Economic Performance (Work-in-progress)

 

Der-Ting Huang & Joseph Mahoney

Stage: Theory paper; Literature review stage

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to provide an integrated framework to explain the differential firm performance affected by multinationality. Motivated by the mixed empirical findings in the multinationality literature, we maintain that the lack of incorporation of the multinationality concept embedded in the geographic factor can potentially reconcile these mixed findings. Specifically, we submit that due to the multilocational nature of international firms, it is crucial to consider simultaneously multiple dimensions stemming from differences in geographic locations, including economic, institutional, resource, peers, and industrial factors. Therefore, we propose a new theoretical framework to explain the multinationality-performance nexus. This paper aims to contribute to the general theory of the firm by integrating geographic and institutional variables to explain differences in international firm performance when competing in global markets.

Competitive Dynamics and Cross-Border Diffusion of Corporate Environmental Strategies in Multinational Corporations (Work-in-progress)

 

Der-Ting Huang & Fiona Kun Yao

Stage: Empirical paper; Data analysis stage​

About Me

Contact Me

derting2@illinois.edu

+1 (929)287-8652

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Gies College of Business

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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