Corporate entrepreneurship, country institutions and firm financial performance

Adopting an institutional perspective, we propose that home country intellectual property (IP) and employee protection institutions moderate the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and firm perfor-mance. Examining 9642 European firms, we find that whereas internal CE is more positively correlated with firm performance in countries with less stringent IP protection and less stringent employee protection, external CE is particularly negatively correlated with firm performance in countries with less stringent IP protection and more stringent employee protection. These results provide a richer view of the relationship between CE and firm performance than the extant entrepreneurship and international businesses literatures suggest.