The Internationalization of State-Owned Enterprises: An Analysis of cross-border M&As

Using a database of more than 100,000 M&As, we study the internationalization of StateOwned Enterprises (SOEs) in the 21st century, and the underlying firm-level and country-level drivers. Meaningful differences are found compared to private enterprises and across various types of SOEs as well along many dimensions, including the time trend, the geographicalsectoral coverage, and firms’ proprietary structure. Majority-owned SOEs are more focused on domestic markets, while State-Invested Enterprises and government-backed financial institutions are more internationalized. SOEs’ internationalization has been less affected by the Great Financial Crisis, it is less sensitive to geographical and cultural proximity, it involves countries with a lower institutional quality and which are more peripheral in the world trade network.