Institutional Development and Business Group Affiliation Value : Theory and Evidence

In this paper, we attempt to understand whether business group affiliation continues to create value with improvements in institutional environment, especially with increased product market competition. This question comes at a time when there is growing awareness that business groups dominate product markets even in developed economies (Boutin et al., 2013) and their existence is not limited to poor institutional environments (Khanna and Palepu, 2000). Such evidence calls for revisiting the Institutional Voids theory that attributes business group dominance to lack of institutional development. Our paper aims to extend this stream of the literature by focusing on how business groups respond to institutional development. The question that is still wide open is how business groups transform their structure and continue to dominate the corporate landscape. Given that most of the emerging economies are going through significant institutional development and domestic business groups are transforming into global leaders, a deeper understanding of the business group model dominance and corresponding consumer welfare is much needed. We develop a simple theoretical model and set up a novel empirical methodology to examine this issue. Using Indian data of around 36,500 firm year observations spanning 23 years (1990-2012), we find that 1) Business group affiliation continues to create value against standalone firms even with institutional development. However, affiliation gains are relatively lower in the post-reform regime. 2) Business groups that expand through horizontal integration lose market value in the post-reform regime. This result is consistent with our theoretical model. 3) In the post-reform regime, vertical integration increases business group affiliation value only when business groups have deep pockets. This is consistent with Boutin et.al. (2013). In other words, deep pockets are required more when competition is high and not when it is low as predicted by the Institutional Voids Hypothesis. Our overall results suggests that, as markets develop, business group expansion strategy and their capacity to fund from their deep pockets become more critical for their sustainability. Our results highlight the need to look beyond Institutional Voids theory for existence of business groups