Institutional voids, international learning effort and internationalization of emerging market new ventures

Much of the existing scholarly works portray institutional voids (IVs) in emerging economies asimpeding forces against the development of new ventures. However, little attention has been paidto how such voids generate positive outcomes in emerging market new ventures. Drawing on theinstitutional theory, we propose IVs as crucial enablers of new venture internationalization. Inaddition, we investigate both how and when IVs enhance the degree to which new venturesinternationalize by examining international learning effort (ILE) as a mediator and two domesticmarket environmental factors (i.e., environmental dynamism and competitive intensity) asimportant contingencies. We test our moderated mediation model using primary data gatheredfrom 211 new ventures from Ghana. We found that ILE mediates the relationship between IVs andnew venture internationalization and that both environmental dynamism and competitive intensitymoderate the indirect relationship between home-country IVs and new ventureinternationalization. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study.