Political Hazards, Experience and Sequential Entry Strategies: The International Expansion of Japanese Firms, 1980-1998

We extend the stages model of internationalization to incorporate a sophisticated consideration of temporal and cross-national variation in the credibility of the policy environment. Using a sample of 6,570 international expansions of 665 Japanese manufacturing firms, we build on the concepts of uncertainty and experiential learning, to show that firms that had gathered relevant types of international experience were less sensitive to uncertain...