Anna Grosman wins Best Paper Award at 2025 European International Business Academy (EIBA)
Prof Anna Grosman
IMEG member Prof Anna Grosman has won a Best Paper Award at the 2025 European International Business Academy (EIBA) conference for her paper "Consequences of Multinationals' Forced Foreign Divestments" in the "Government Policies, Politics, International Relations in IB" track. The work is co-authored with Alvara Cuervo-Cazurra, Htwe Htwe Thein, Sergey Sosnovskikh, and Luisa Campos.
The winning paper studies the consequences of multinational firms’ forced divestments from a host country. Most studies of international divestments examine firms that divest from a host country because they fail to achieve their strategic goals or profitability. We complement this approach by analyzing firms being forced to divest due to geopolitical conflicts. Building on transaction cost economics theory and the analysis of 29 forced divestments from Myanmar, we propose a conceptual process framework to understand post-exit consequences for multinationals, identifying the drivers, moderators, and consequences of forced divestment. The findings reveal four types of forced divestments (pressured, conflicted, strategic, and principled) and four moderating conditions (capital intensity, sensitive technology, labor intensity, and investment lifecycle stage) that shape the magnitude of divestment costs and temporal patterns. The study provides a novel and nuanced understanding of how home countries generate transaction costs in host country operations, how asset specificity creates heterogeneous exit profiles, and how geopolitical disruptions create contexts where cost optimization becomes impossible, extending TCE.
