Maria Cristina Sestu wins EIBA Best Paper Award

Maria Cristina Sestu has won the Best Paper Award in the track International Finance, Accounting and Corporate Governance at the EIBA conference, held at the end of 2023. She received the award for her paper titled ‘Joint venture growth and goal congruence of ultimate owners’.

Maria Cristina Sestu is assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business’ (FEB) Department of Global Economics & Management. In her paper, she explores the reasons why joint ventures fail, from the perspective of the ultimate owners of joint ventures. Sestu integrates two well-established streams of literature: the role of goal congruence and the influence of ultimate owners’ type.

Ultimate owner type similarity matters

In the paper, she hypothesizes that partners with ultimate owners of the same type (i.e. family owned, state owned, institutional) will have similar goals and visions and that goal congruence stimulates joint venture growth. She further hypothesizes that the positive relationship is stronger if the ultimate owners come from countries in the same cultural cluster. Sestu tests these hypotheses using a sample of 496 joint ventures (domestic and international) and 819 ultimate owners, and finds that joint ventures formed between partners controlled by the same type of ultimate owner (i.e. family-family, state-state, institutional-institutional) do grow faster than joint ventures between partners controlled by ultimate owners not of the same type. She also finds that the effect is stronger if same-type ultimate owners come from countries in the same cultural cluster.

EIBA conference

The European International Business Academy (EIBA) organizes an annual conference. EIBA is a professional society for researchers, academics and practitioners with an interest in the greater field of International Business. Under the topic of ‘The Changing Global Power Balance: Challenges for European Firms’, the 2023 EIBA Annual Conference was an opportunity to explore the ways how these turbulent conditions have affected international business and related fields. While combining the knowledge of international business research with other social sciences, the objective of this conference was to debate how this shift in the structural conditions affects the international strategies of MNCs, SMEs, and born globals, as well as to discuss the emerging new opportunities and challenges for European firms. This EIBA Conference explored these promising topics as well as more traditional ones related with international business. Special attention was given to research that focuses on the impact of those recent incidents that have changed the economic, social and political environment and which have affected the competitiveness of European firms, as well as the new balance between the World economic blocks.

Questions? Please contact Maria Cristina Sestu.