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Purpose Strategic positioning of foreign firms in a host market is vital for their success. By integrating the resource partitioning theory and the resource-based view, this study aims to investigate foreign firms’ strategic positioning (i.e. their choice of generalist or specialist positioning strategy) and its performance implications in the US market. Design/methodology/approach The final sample includes 212 foreign companies from 28 countries operating in the US market. Multiple data sources were used to collect data of these foreign companies’ subsidiaries in the USA This study used logistic regression to test its major hypotheses. Findings The results of this study suggest that a generalist positioning strategy is positively related to performance in a host market. It is also found that market concentration and local market knowledge moderate this strategic positioning – performance relationship. Research limitations/implications For a foreign firm that enters a host market, market concentration (an industry-level factor) in the host market and the firm’s local market knowledge (a firm-specific factor) play prominent roles in the strategic positioning – performance relationship. Originality/value This study offers a novel perspective of international business strategy by applying the lens of resource partitioning theory to study the relationships between multinational enterprises’ strategic positioning and performance. This study contributes to the strategy literature in that it examines the performance implications of firms’ strategic positioning (i.e. generalist or specialist positioning).

This paper investigates the effect of bilateral relations on exports using data from Google Global Data. It fi nds that bilateral relations signifi cantly reduced the negative effect of cultural distance on exports, indicating that they can promote exports by reducing trade costs. The paper finds that higher average Goldstein scores of events correlated with more exports and that bilateral relations had a larger eff ect on trustintensive products, indicating that positive relations built trust and decreased the emotional distance between trading partners. The results also show that bilateral relations promoted exports at both the intensive and extensive margins but with a greater eff ect on the latter. Finally, bilateral relations had a greater positive eff ect on developing countries than on developed ones. The results were qualitatively unchanged when endogeneity issues and robustness concerns were considered.

Using Chinese microdata from 2000 to 2013, we document how demand shocks in export markets lead multi‐product exporters to adjust markups across products. We find that, in response to positive demand shocks, quality‐based competitive multi‐product firms increase product markups significantly, particularly for core products, whereas cost‐based competitive multi‐product firms respond by reducing product markups. The reason for this is that positive foreign demand affects markups through two opposite channels: pro‐innovative effects and pro‐competitive effects. Pro‐innovative effects are predominant among quality‐based competitive multi‐product firms, and these firms respond to positive foreign demand shocks by increasing product quality, prices, and markups. Pro‐competitive effects are predominant among cost‐based competitive multi‐product firms, and these firms respond to positive foreign demand shocks by lowering product cost, prices, and markups. We demonstrate the presence of these mechanisms empirically. The results imply that firms with different competition strategies should adopt different measures in response to foreign demand shocks.