Signaling by early stage startups: US government research grants and venture capital funding

Entrepreneurship researchers have documented that early stage startups rely on signals to demonstrate the transitions in their identities that they must make when they cross organizational life cycle thresholds. However, early stage startups in emerging industry contexts tend to have few good signals upon which to rely. Public agencies can play a valuable role in this process, but prior research has not sufficiently examined how startups effectively leverage this support. In this paper, therefore, we develop a framework to investigate the role that signals can play for early stage startups when they win prestigious government research grants. We test this framework in the setting of the emerging U.S. clean energy sector and find that in comparison to a matched sample of clean energy startups that have not won prestigious research grants, startups with these grants were 12% more likely to acquire subsequent venture capital (VC) funding. Another significant result is that the value of this signaling is greater for startups that have fewer patents. The important contribution of this finding is that it shows that signaling has the potential to redistribute benefits rather than just provide an additional accrual of advantages to the already high status actors. Together these results highlight the advantages for startups in emerging industries of pursuing signaling strategies with public agencies when they attempt to make important transitions through the stages of their organizational life cycles.

The direct and indirect effects of economic wealth on time to take-off

Our objective is to decompose the influence of the economic wealth on the time to sales take-off into a direct effect and an indirect effect through time to introduction. We use a traditional regression based and an advanced counterfactual framework for our analysis, based on adoption data for four generations of mobile phone from 172 countries. Our study extends the sales take-off literature by better understanding how the commercialization stage (time to introduction) affects the confirmation stage (time to sales take-off) in innovation diffusion while controlling for local market structure, socio-economic, demographic and cultural variables suggested in the literature. We show that economic wealth exerts: a positive direct effect by shortening sales take-off time; a negative indirect effect by shortening time to introduction which tends to extend time to sales take-off. The uncovering of this relationship is achieved by treating time to introduction as a mediating variable, departing from previous studies where it is treated as an exogeneous variable. We further show that the negative indirect effect is diluted in the case of high income countries but not in the case of upper middle-income countries. A sensitivity analysis shows the robustness of our findings. Our findings will help firms develop optimal market entry strategies considering the resources available.     

The Bilateral J‐Curve in Australia: A Nonlinear Reappraisal

Since the introduction of error‐correction and cointegration techniques, the J‐curve effect implies an initial short‐run deterioration of the trade balance, followed by improvement later due to currency devaluation. In a previous study of Australia’s bilateral trade, with each of her 23 partners, using the linear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach we found the J‐curve effect in the model with the United Kingdom only. However, after incorporating the ARDL model that allows for nonlinear adjustment of exchange rate changes, we found the effect on four more partners – all asymmetrically. Furthermore, we document short‐run asymmetry in exchange rate changes in almost all models; short‐run adjustment asymmetry, and impact‐asymmetry in almost half of the models.     

The influence of demographic characteristics of hospitality alumni on entrepreneurship factors in Egypt

The purpose of this article is to study the effect of demographic characteristics of hospitality alumni on entrepreneurship factors, and determine which factors are the most important for the alumni to become entrepreneurs. A questionnaire had been developed and distributed online using Google Forms. Data were collected from 314 hospitality alumni. All the hypotheses have been supported, proving that the investigated demographic characteristics have a significant effect on entrepreneurship factors, particularly motivation, innovation and personal skills. The study’s sample was limited to alumni of faculties of tourism and hotels in governmental universities only. Policy-makers implication, practical implication, and social implication are discussed based on the results of this study. This is one of the first studies in Egypt to study the effect of demographic characteristics of hospitality alumni on entrepreneurship. Moreover, it provides significant findings that can enhance the overall status of entrepreneurship in Egypt’s hospitality industry.     

Corporate Disclosure in Relation to Combating Corporate Bribery: A Case Study of Two Chinese Telecommunications Companies

This paper investigates the association between global community concerns about bribery activities and anti‐bribery disclosure practices by two Chinese telecommunication companies operating internationally, namely China Mobile and ZTE. Based on content analysis of annual reports and global news media articles over a period of 16 years from 1995–2010, the findings suggest that the changes in the level of disclosures by the two major Chinese telecommunications companies were closely associated with the level of international concerns over bribery practices within the Chinese telecommunications industry. This finding indicates that the companies adopt anti‐bribery disclosure practices in order to minimise the gap of trust (social capital) between companies themselves and global stakeholders. In this paper we argue that, for domestic companies in China, culturally constructed social capital, such as guanxi, creates a level of trust between managers and their stakeholders, which obviates the need for managers to disclose anti‐bribery performance information. However, for companies operating internationally, as social capital is inadequate to bridge the gap of trust between managers and global stakeholders, managers use disclosures of anti‐bribery performance information as a way to minimise such a gap.     

Disclosures of Social Value Creation and Managing Legitimacy: A Case Study of Three Global Social Enterprises

This study seeks to fill the gap in the existing literature by examining how and whether disclosure of social value creation becomes a part of the legitimation strategies of social enterprises. In particular, using Suchman's (1995) moral dimension of legitimacy theory, this study sets out whether and how disclosures by three global social organisations – Grameen Bank, Charity Water and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – conform to the expectations of the broader community. The study finds that there is an apparent disconnection between disclosure and action by social enterprises. With reference to a few incidents, social enterprises use disclosure as a part of their managerial efforts, rather than to create moral legitimacy. The notion of apparent disconnection between disclosure and real action by social enterprises is evident. The notion is consistent with extant disclosure literature capturing the motivations for the disclosure practices of corporations. The findings of this paper suggest that when an organisation (whether it is a corporation or a social enterprise) faces a legitimacy crisis, it appears to disclose good news rather than bad news, which calls into question organisational moral legitimacy.     

Spatial Patterns of Inequality and Poverty in Indonesia

The paper uses data from the 1976 Household Expenditure Survey (Susenas) to examine spatial patterns of poverty and inequality in Indonesia. A number of inequality measures are computed for each province (Gini Ratio. Atkinson Index, Theil Index, L-Index) and provincial rankings according to each index are compared. Provinces are also ranked according to a number of poverty indexes, using a poverty line adjusted for differences in price levels, between provinces. The correlation between selected measures of poverty and inequality is also investigated and some implications for regional development policy discussed.     

A reliability engineering approach for forecasting technological breakthroughs

One of the major attributes determining system reliability, the one that has received the most thorough and systematic study for many years, is system survival function. A “survival function” is a mathematical formula relating the probability of satisfactory performance of a system to time. Here, probability of satisfactory performance is synonymous with probability of nonfailure or probability of survival of a performing system.In breakthrough analysis of complex technological systems, the situation is somewhat similar but opposite to the above system reliability case. For breakthrough forecasting, the problem is to determine the probability of occurrence of success of a nonperforming system. Thus this paper presents a quantitative methodology for forecasting technological breakthroughs using a new concept of “attainability function,” derived in a similar fashion as the “reliability function.”     

Does paternity leave matter for female employment in developing economies? Evidence from firm-level data

Analysis using firm-level data for a sample of 33,302 firms in 53 developing countries shows that women’s employment among private firms is significantly higher in countries that mandate paternity leave versus those that do not. A conservative estimate suggests an increase of 6.8 percentage points in the proportion of women workers associated with mandating paternity leave. The empirical specification is immune to spurious correlations that affect the level of women and men employment equally and also robust to a large number of controls for country and firm characteristics.