Luciana Dalla Valle

When the choice of one firm’s internationalisation regards the establishment of a subsidiary in a foreign country, then internationalization is a very complex process involving many variables. Some of them regard the features of the foreign countries in which Italian Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) formerly established subsidiaries; others regard the consequences of SMEs internationalisation through their economic performance. Through the joint analysis of two variable sets (about countries and firms) and through the statistical method (the Bayesian hierarchical mixed logit model) we are going to implement, we will be able to describe both the most significant characteristics of the firms that opened subsidiaries abroad and the characteristics of the country where the opening took place. The analysis concerns about 400 firms that started an internationalisation process before 2004. Keywords: Internationalisation, Bayesian hierarchical models, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Bayesian mixed logit model.