Although recent work provides insightful theoretical and practical suggestions for improving contextual distance research in international management, the fundamental problem with using distance indicators as explanatory variables remains too little recognized and largely unaddressed. This problem is that cross-national distance metrics partially identify host and/or home countries in one's sample, what I term location-identification. Location-identification can occur irrespective of the number of home/host countries considered and means that a distance indicator partly captures country fixed effects when used as an independent or explanatory variable. As a result, in empirical distance research, genuine distance effects are often confounded with country-specific measurement error in the dependent variable as well as with direct effects due to various home- or host-country features. I present empirical evidence on the pervasiveness of this critical challenge to cross-national distance research and propose a practical and effective solution for addressing it, which is to use “pure” distance indicators that are cleansed from confounding home- and host-location influences.

尽管最近的工作为改善国际管理中的上下文距离研究提供了有见地的理论和实践建议，但是使用距离指标作为解释变量的基本问题仍然鲜为人知，并且很大程度上未得到解决。问题在于，跨国距离度量标准部分地识别了样本中的东道国和/或本国，我称之为位置识别。位置识别可以不考虑所考虑的本国/所在国的数量而进行，这意味着距离指示器在用作自变量或解释性变量时会部分捕获国家的固定影响。结果，在经验距离研究中，真正的距离效应常常与因变量中因国家而异的测量误差以及由于各种母国或东道国特征而产生的直接效应混为一谈。我提供了关于这一严峻挑战对跨国距离研究的普遍性的经验证据，并提出了解决该问题的实用有效方法，即使用“纯净”距离指示器，该指示器可以消除混杂的家庭和宿主位置影响。