Journal of Business Research

Despite decades of falling trade barriers and advancing globalization, most multinational enterprises (MNEs) never venture beyond their home region. We argue that part of the explanation lies in ownership structure: who ultimately controls the firm determines how broadly it operates and how freely its geographic scope can be adjusted. Drawing on the attention-based view, we derive eight hypotheses about how ownership origin, international experience, and concentration shape the breadth of geographic scope and the direction of its adjustment over time. Using a large panel of German MNEs, we show that domestic ownership is associated with broader scope and greater propensity for upward adjustment, with the advantage strongest for internationally experienced owners. Ownership concentration constrains the level of geographic scope but not whether it expands or contracts. These findings provide the first evidence on ownership and geographic scope for developed-country MNEs and reorient theoretical debate from resource transfer to organizational authorization.