How cross-national differences matter for ownership strategies in cross-border acquisitions is a longstanding topic in international business scholarship, but the role of human rights has received far less systematic attention in this stream. We examine how human rights distance between host and home countries relates to emerging market multinational enterprises' (EMNEs) acquired ownership levels and how host-country experience conditions this relationship. We introduce human rights distance as a directional non-market dimension of cross-national distance and clarify the context-specific role of host-country experience. We integrate an institution-based view with the springboard perspective as explanatory lenses to discuss EMNEs' early international expansion. We test our hypotheses using a unique dataset of cross-border acquisitions from emerging markets between 1995 and 2011. We find that greater human rights distance is associated with higher acquired ownership levels in EMNEs' targets, and that host-country experience weakens this association. Our findings suggest that greater human rights distance can create both governance demands and legitimacy-related opportunities for EMNEs.
Zhong et al. (Mon,) studied this question.