Tapping the liabilitiesʹʹ side - Austrian evidence for private equity investor involvement, growth and the internationalization of firms

This paper aims to close one of the most persistent gaps in international business (IB) and strategic management (SM) research by advocating a systematic extension of our research perspective to a more finance-based "liabilitiesʹ approach". As such, it responds to the recent work of prominent scholars such as Agmon (2006) and Bowe, Filatotchev and Marshall (2010). We challenge the prevailing "finance follows" mindset and – using Private Equity (PE) investors as an illustrative example – we demonstrate how an integrated approach may improve existing theories and open up entirely new avenues of research. We present confirmatory as well as exploratory findings on the impact of investors, suggesting that a companyʹs ownership not only determines a companyʹs financial strength but also has a number of less obvious implications for growth and internationalization. Our findings suggest that investors may be a strategic asset and can serve as catalysts for a companyʹs growth at several levels of involvement.