Studies observing FDI (e.g., Pedersen & Shaver, 2011) found support for duration dependence in their internationalization strategies and found that the first market entry took considerably more time and effort than the following entries. We observed nonequity entry modes as largely consistent with previous studies on INVs and we were able to identify accelerated internationalization strategies. These inequalities, however, may be caused primarily by the differences in entry modes observed which leaves room for future studies to compare duration dependence between FDI and export modes. Moreover, export market survival is only one aspect of firm performance. Sapienza et al. (2006) predicted that born-global firms will have a lower chance of survival because of the liabilities of foreignness and newness; however, they also predicted that, if they survive, they will achieve better performance because they will have profited from the learning advantages of newness. Future research should examine this argument and investigate the impact of different internationalization strategies on firm survival and growth.
While we applied a slack resource lens to argue for the effects of firm size and productivity, strategy and capability-building rationales might be also conducive for explaining our results in further detail. For instance, would it be interesting to advance further into the interaction between the different resources variables. The co-occurrence of large firm size and high productivity could, for example, imply a low-cost strategy. Such a strategy could provide competitive advantages and increase SMEs’ odds to survive in the export market. While we did not focus on the interaction between size and productivity, but on their independent effects on SMEs’ export market survival and their interaction with different internationalization strategies, future studies should emphasize the complex interplay between business strategy and SME internationalization in more detail. Future studies may also separate different types of slack and their respective exportmarket survival implications. Accordingly, future studies may differentiate between unabsorbed and absorbed slack (Tan & Peng, 2003). It is also possible that financial slack, human resource slack, operational slack and customerrelation slack unfold different effects on SMEs export survival as they have been shown to differently relate to product exploration and exploitation (Voss et al., 2008).
In conclusion, we use a large-scale longitudinal data set to show that internationalization strategy has no direct impact on a firm’s resources on SMEs’ export market survival; instead, internationalization strategy has moderating effects on export market survival. We contribute to internationalization analytical frameworks by showing that each internationalization strategy can be a promising tool and that the variance in the value of these strategic choices for SME survival abroad is eliminated if the endogeneity of strategy choice is controlled for. Accordingly, we underscore the recent conclusion by several editors of the Journal of International Business
Studies (Reeb, Sakakibara, & Mahmood, 2012) that studies that do not control for endogeneity may yield biased estimates with respect to the impact of internationalization strategy.