Knee Deep in the Big Muddy: The Survival of Emerging Market Firms in Developed Markets

This study of Latin American banks located in the United States employs a resource-based framework to explain how subunits of emerging market firms can overcome the challenges of operating in a developed market. Our results show that an EMF subunit can draw upon ethnic identity as a valuable and costly-to-imitate resource to achieve competitive parity in the developed market. Ethnic resources can be generated not only from ethnically similar customers but also from ethnically similar competitors in the local market. In addition, the parent firm' level local and non-local resources can help to achieve competitive parity for the EMF subunits in that country, which in turn positively influences survival. However, over expansion can lead to spreading local and non-local resources too thin, thus adversely affecting survival.