Traditional theories from the international business and strategy literatures have posited that institutional distance constrains firm internationalization and that slack financial and managerial resources can be redeployed to help overcome this distance and facilitate growth. However, are slack resources equally effective when entering host markets of different institutional quality? Combining an institutional economics’ view of distance with a Penrosean perspective on resources, we argue that financial slack allows firms “to pay their way” into more institutionally developed markets, whereas managerial slack allows firms “to work their way” into less institutionally developed markets. From data on the internationalization of 307 Indian computer software companies over 16 years, we find support for our hypotheses when considering formal institutional distance. We also find that managerial slack mitigates informal institutional distance, irrespective of the direction of internationalization. Additional robustness tests, using propensity score matching, and an alternative sample of 3600 manufacturing firms from 49 countries, support our main results. Our findings suggest that slack is not a generic panacea for overcoming institutional distance, in that the effectiveness of each type of slack is dependent on both the direction of entry and the type of institutional distance to be overcome, formal or informal.

国际商业和战略文献中的传统理论认为，制度距离限制了企业的国际化，可以重新部署闲置的财务和管理资源，以帮助克服这种距离并促进增长。然而，当进入不同制度质量的东道国市场时，闲置资源是否同样有效？将制度经济学的距离观与彭罗斯的资源观相结合，我们认为，金融宽松使得企业“花钱”进入制度更发达的市场，而管理宽松则允许企业“努力”进入制度不太发达的市场。从 16 年来 307 家印度计算机软件公司国际化的数据来看，我们在考虑正式制度距离时发现了对我们假设的支持。我们还发现，无论国际化的方向如何，管理松懈都会减轻非正式的制度距离。使用倾向评分匹配和来自 49 个国家的 3600 家制造公司的替代样本进行的额外稳健性测试支持了我们的主要结果。我们的研究结果表明，松弛并不是克服制度距离的万能药，因为每种松弛的有效性都取决于进入的方向和要克服的制度距离的类型，无论是正式的还是非正式的。