Antecedents and Context of Chinese Firms’ Foreign Exit
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Referee Report for the Paper “Antecedents and Context of Chinese Firms’ Foreign Exit”
Summary: The paper examines outward foreign direct investments behavior of Chinese manufacturing firms from 2008 to 2022 and finds that sunk costs and firm performance affect foreign exit strategies. In addition, environmental munificence and complexity modify the strength of these effects. The paper is well-written and carefully executed. My comments are presented below.
Major Comments:
1. The Introduction is very thorough and clear. However, it almost exclusively focuses on international studies. Are there any papers that focused on China? If so, what do they find? If no one did this analysis for China before, this should be noted in the Introduction too.
The last paragraph on page 2 says: “Although there exists research focusing on Chinese firms’ foreign exit, it mainly uses primary data…” Please clarify what is the disadvantage of this approach and why secondary data is more suitable for your analysis?
2. The sample contains the period of global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and Covid-driven economic slowdown and global supply chain disruption of 2020. Do the results remain the same when you exclude these periods? This could provide additional support for your main findings.
3. In Section 4.5, the authors report the results of an endogeneity test. It would be helpful to expand this sentence: “Table 10 presents regression results and indicates that our findings are reliable and robust”. Could you be more specific in explaining this conclusion?
4. Environmental munificence is measured as a 5-year growth rate in industry sales? How do you justify choosing a 5-year period? What if you construct this measure over 10 years as in some other studies (e.g., Goll and Rasheed (2004))? How does it affect the main results?
5. Is the measure of performance feedback employed in this paper standard in the literature. If there are other measures of performance, what are the advantages of using ROA?
Minor Comments:
1. The last sentence in Section 3.2 is not needed. Stata is a standard software tool that the readers are familiar with.
2. Section 5 can be renamed as “Conclusions” as it reflects its content better.
3. Tables should be formatted to remove dividing lines for each row.
References:
Goll, I. and Rasheed A. A. (2004) The Moderating Effect of Environmental Munificence and Dynamism on the Relationship between Discretionary Social Responsibility and Firm Performance, Journal of Business Ethics.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe paper analyses the outward foreign direct investment of Chinese manufacturing companies from the period starting from the recession of 2008 up to 2022.
The abstract can be enhanced to reveal more of the findings and to suggest different strategies that can be taken by companies. The authors mention in the abstract the “double-loop strategy” but I could not find any other information in the document regarding this strategy, and how can be used and applied.
Only Table 1 is mentioned the source, while the other nine tables in the article lack this mention.
The references are too old, even from 1955 (Simon, H.A. A behavioral model of rational choice. Quarterly Journal of Economics 1955, 69,), in 2025, this source will be 70 years old. I urge the authors to use newer and up-to-date references.
The authors can propose more strategies for companies when they decide to exit foreign markets.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors have conducted almost all the changes that I suggested.
