What drives emerging market firms' performance? The role of macroeconomic environment, industry, and slack.

The purpose of this research is to describe the influences of macroeconomic context, competitive environment, and firm’s slack of resources on the performance of BRICS' firms, operating between 2006 and 2016. The model was estimated by four levels multilevel modelling, and results indicate that firms’ slack of resources does influence firms’ performance over time, and that the effects of macroeconomic context, as measured by means of gross domestic product and market reference interest rate, surplus the effects exerted by industry, as measured by dynamism, concentration, and munificence. This article brings to light the discussion about the roles played by macroeconomics, industry and firm factors that simultaneously influence firm’s performance across time. Our contribution to the advance in the field of research resides on the exploration of the proposed relationships in the context of emerging markets, before, during and after the 2008 global financial crisis. The main contribution of the research is to bring a new point of view about the factors that influence performance variance, when considering time, firm, competitive environment, and macroeconomic context in the same multilevel model.