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INTRODUCTION
The field of international business has paid much attention to the impact of cross-national distance on the decision to enter specific countries, the sequence of market entry, and the choice of entry mode, among others. These research topics lie at the core of the field of international business, and researchers have for decades used cross-national distance as a main explanatory variable (for a review see Werner, 2002). These fundamental decisions have been explored by scholars ever since the founder of the field, Stephen Hymer (1960), noted that a key factor shaping the internationalization of the firm was the so-called "liability of foreignness", which increases with the distance between the home and host countries. The eclectic paradigm (Dunning, 1993) also called attention to cross-national distance, proposing a multidimensional perspective. In this view, countries may be "distant" from each other not only in the geographic sense, but also because economic, social, cultural, or political differences make it harder for firms to operate across them.
In spite of decades of research, the field has not yet provided a comprehensive analysis of the fact that countries differ from one another on a number of dimensions. For instance, Johanson and Vahlne (1977: 24) alluded to "differences in language, education, business practices, culture, and industrial development" as relevant dimensions. Similarly, Kogut and Singh (1988: 413) referred generically to the "characteristics of a foreign market", and proceeded to calculate dyadic distances between pairs of countries using Hofstede's (1980) cultural constructs: uncertainty avoidance, power distance, individualism, and masculinity. For their part, Barkema, Bell, and Pennings (1996: 153) mentioned "linguistic, institutional, cultural, and political factors", but measured the construct in terms of cultural distance and cultural blocs of countries. Lastly, Hennart and Larimo (1998: 517), who approached distance from a transaction-cost perspective, restricted their definition to "national cultural characteristics of the home and host countries", measuring it using Hofstede's data. These international business scholars have argued that cross-national differences of a psychic or cultural nature increase uncertainty by preventing information or knowledge to flow between countries, thus increasing the cost of doing business across borders, that is, the transaction costs associated with international business. Though conceptually recognizing the multidimensional nature of distance, most international business scholars have undertaken empirical work on cross-national distance...