Corporate governance in multinational corporations: Aligning the interests of subsidiaries and headquarters

This thesis investigates the corporate governance relationships that exist between multinational corporations' subsidiaries and their headquarters. Parent-subsidiary corporate governance relationships align the interests of the subsidiaries with the interests of the headquarters, and they are represented by the bundles of corporate governance mechanisms of the subsidiaries. Substantial compositional variation can be observed in the bundles of corporate governance mechanisms used in the subsidiaries. In order to deepen our understanding of how corporate governance relationships are designed, it is necessary to explain this compositional variation. In this thesis, it is proposed that the compositional variation in the bundles is configurational. As a result, it is hypothesized that different types of bundles of corporate governance mechanisms, which represent different types of corporate governance relationships, can be identified. In addition, it is proposed that the type of bundle of corporate governance mechanisms adopted by a subsidiary depends on two factors. The first factor is the expected benefits of the corporate governance relationship that the bundle represents, and the second factor is the cost benefit tradeoffs among corporate governance mechanisms that can be used in the bundle. Corporate governance systems of home and host countries for the multinational and the subsidiary, and firm specific factors that represent, environmental, strategic, and structural contingencies are expected to influence these two factors. Therefore, it is hypothesized that the corporate governance systems and firm specific factors help determine the types of bundles that are observed in subsidiaries. To test the framework that is presented in this thesis, the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinational corporations are used. The bundle of corporate governance mechanisms that is used in each subsidiary is identified. Cluster analysis is applied to the bundles in order to verify the existence of types of bundles, and to uncover a taxonomy of types of bundles. After the identification of different types of bundles, multicategory logit models are used to test whether the corporate governance systems and the firm specific factors, that are identified in this thesis, help predict the types of bundles that multinationals adopt. The results support the framework developed in this thesis.