International Business Research; Vol. 8, No. 6; 2015 ISSN 1913-9004 E-ISSN 1913-9012 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education Entry Mode of Offshore School Enterprises from English Speaking Countries Parkes, Michael1 & Han, I1 1 School of Business, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan Correspondence: Han, I, Department of International Trade, School of Business, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan. Tel: 886-4-2451-7250 ext. 4269. E-mail:
[email protected] Received: April 13, 2015 Accepted: May 5, 2015 Online Published: May 25, 2015 doi:10.5539/ibr.v8n6p174 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ibr.v8n6p174 Abstract Offshore schools are for-profit educational services designed to grant home government recognised high school diplomas to students in an overseas country. This paper takes the theoretical perspectives of institutions and transaction cost economics to investigate how offshore school multinational enterprises choose the entry mode in foreign direct investment. We create a dataset for offshore schools from developed English-speaking countries to provide supporting evidence. We find that resulting from stringent regulations on the education system by home country authorities, offshore school enterprises tend to choose the high control mode in the host country when the specificity of investments is high, particularly in feeder schools as the guaranteed parent university admission with an offshore school high school diploma. Our study provides theoretical implications on entry mode choices upon home country institutions, as well as temporal specificity of the feeder school investment. Keywords: entry mode, transaction cost, institutions, offshore school enterprise 1. Introduction The offshore schools industry has brought together the fields of international business and education for mutual goals.