Organizational Expansion to Underserved Markets: Insights from African Firms

Although scholars have highlighted the need for firms to explore and exploit market opportunities in underserved markets to achieve superior performance, emerging‐market firms’ strategic choices and constraints in such environments remains an underexplored area. Drawing on insights from the intra‐Africa air travel sector, we uncovered that the intense competitive pressures on inter‐African routes has intensified both exploration and exploitation activities on the intra‐African market as firms seek to mitigate the competitive effects. We also found that the firms’ exploitation activities have been punctuated by a number of firm‐specific and institutional factors. The theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

专业服务业外国直接投资的全球发展格局研究及启示

专业服务业是新兴服务业中最具代表性的行业,也是目前国际市场上最活跃的分子之一。其发展的时间虽然不长,然而发展速度与程度都非常值得关注和研究。本文在分析相关数据资料的基础上,探讨专业服务业外国直接投资全球发展格局的主要特点,并针对专业服务业的发展特点与关键因素,提出对我国企业发展的启示。     

Barriers to Marketing Implementation in U.K. Professional Service Firms

This paper focuses upon the critical role that imple- mentation plays in determining the 'success' or 'failure' of the mar- keting function. The authors discuss the particular implementation problems that are faced by marketers in professional service firms in the UK where marketing is still a relatively new function, and pro- pose a number of ways in which marketers may be able to overcome some of these internal barriers.     

The Principled Legal Firm: Insights into the Professional Ideals and Ethical Values of Partners and Lawyers

Understanding how the professional ideals and values of partners influence lawyers’ everyday life is a relatively unexplored area given the inherent difficulties of gaining access to lawyers. This case study sheds light on the professional ideals and ethical values of partners and lawyers in a mid-tier Sydney law firm. Semi-structured interviews with partners and lawyers/legal clerks reveal how partners’ professional ideals and ethical values play a pivotal role in: (1) upholding positive normative evaluations of lawyer/firm propriety (moral legitimacy), (2) stressing the importance of a balanced working life (cognitive legitimacy) and (3) satisfying younger lawyers’ needs for personal support, autonomy and responsibility (pragmatic legitimacy). The principled actions of partners are portrayed as the cornerstone of shaping a moral community in legal practise.     

External Linkages and Economic Growth in Colombia: Insights from a Bayesian VAR Model

This paper investigates the sensitivity of Colombian GDP growth to the surrounding macroeconomic environment. We estimate a Bayesian VAR model with informative steady‐state priors for the Colombian economy using quarterly data from 1995 to 2007. A variance decomposition shows that world GDP growth and government spending are the most important factors, explaining roughly 17 and 16 per cent of the variance in Colombian GDP growth respectively. The model, which is shown to forecast well out‐of‐sample, can also be used to analyse alternative scenarios. Generating both endogenous and conditional forecasts, we show that the impact on Colombian GDP growth of a substantial downturn in world GDP growth would be non‐negligible but that the decline still would be mild by historical standards.     

金融市场化、融资约束与企业成本加成:来自中国制造业企业的证据

融资约束和成本加成亟需提升是中国制造业企业面临的双重难题,在经济转轨的宏观背景下,能否藉由中国金融市场化改革来破解这一困境?本文以2001—2007年中国制造业企业为样本的实证研究显示:融资约束阻碍了企业成本加成提升,而金融市场化能够有效缓解融资约束对企业成本加成的抑制效应;以工具变量、分样本及替代变量回归等方法进行的稳健性检验进一步证明了本文结论的稳健性。本文的研究结论为进一步推进金融市场化改革,以此作为融资难背景下中国制造业企业成本加成提升的有效路径提供了理论支撑。     

Firm R&D,Processing Trade and Input Trade Liberalisation: Evidence from Chinese Firms

This paper examines the impact of input trade liberalisation on firm R&D activity by taking China's accession to the WTO as a quasi‐natural experiment. Different from ordinary imports, processing imports in China enjoy zero tariffs and are not affected by input trade liberalisation due to the WTO accession. The paper uses disaggregated firm‐level production data and transaction‐level trade data to perform difference‐in‐difference analysis by taking processing import firms as a control group. An intensive empirical search shows that after China's accession to the WTO, input trade liberalisation fostered firm R&D significantly. The findings are robust to different measures and various empirical specifications.     

Data Cleansing Decisions: Insights from Discrete-Event Simulations of Firm Resources and Data Quality

The cost of poor data quality has been measured in the billions of dollars annually. However, deriving coherent data cleansing strategies to improve data quality is challenging because it is often difficult to justify the financial and human capital cost involved in cleaning data. But those who have planned and designed an effective approach to cleaning data report significant benefits. Although extant literature has extensively focused on data quality issues, little attention has been directed toward providing decision-making techniques that help practitioners determine the cost and benefits of adopting data-cleansing approaches. This study advances an approach that illustrates how discrete-event simulation can be used as a decision tool for making data-cleansing decisions, by understanding the interactions among the firms' resources and performance outcomes. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to apply discrete-event simulation for evaluating data-cleansing approaches. The article contributes to an understanding of how various organizational resources interact within, and between, two data-cleansing approaches to drive performance outcomes. Simulation approaches such as the one examined here reveal how the complexity of interactions among such factors can produce results that are difficult to anticipate using other approaches.     

Exploring Factors Influencing the Use of Enterprise Social Networks in Multinational Professional Service Firms

ABSTRACT

Organizations are increasingly implementing enterprise social networks (ESNs) for improved communication and collaboration, as well as enhanced knowledge sharing and innovation among employees. However, the paradoxical relationship between ESN implementation and the promised benefits has been attributed to employees’ underutilization. Our research focuses on factors influencing employees’ decision to use ESN in their work role and draws on case studies of two multinational professional service firms (PSFs) based in Australia. Qualitative data were collected during ten semi-structured interviews with employees from both organizations, to determine their perceptions of ESN usage and capture the factors that influence their use behavior. The findings illustrate that the likelihood of ESN use is significantly influenced by technological, organizational, social and individual factors. A successful ESN use within an organization involves the nexus between these four factors and recommendations are made, as guidelines for organizational actors about how ESNs usage can be increased.     

Firm Resources and Host‐Country Factors Impacting Internationalization of Knowledge‐Intensive Service Firms

In the era of the global economy, knowledge‐based services are becoming important sectors of the service industry. Services offered by a university are knowledge‐based services. Universities are in the service business, and they play a key role in creating and disseminating knowledge through teaching, research, and related services that cross domestic borders. The current research focuses on the internationalization of US MBA programs. The internationalization of US MBA programs refers to the delivery of knowledge‐based services beyond the domestic borders. The main objective of our research is to examine the effect of an organization's (e.g., a US business school) resources and a host country's attractiveness on the internationalization of knowledge‐based services offered by a firm (a US business school). Using data gathered from MBA programs of US colleges and universities, theÊstudy findings show that internationalization is influenced by human capital, prestige and reputation, management's willingness, and foreign market attractiveness. The results of this study offer practical insights for US business school leaders. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

女性董事的风险规避与企业投资行为研究——基于金融危机的视角

本文利用金融危机提供的自然实验机会,分析了女性董事的风险规避倾向是否会影响公司的投资决策。通过对2007—2009年A股上市公司的实证分析发现,在金融危机期间,女性董事比率高的公司投资水平下降得更快,而且这种效应主要集中在过度投资的公司中。进一步研究还发现,在金融危机期间,女性董事比率高的公司会减少长期借款,从而为企业未来的投资机会储备债务融资能力。本文结论表明,在面临不确定性的情况下,女性的风险规避有利于减少公司的过度投资,帮助公司克服金融危机所带来的不利影响。     

Organization Capital and Expected Returns in Service and Non‐Service Firms: Evidence from Thailand

Organization capital provides firms with competitive advantage, but because of its intangible and movable nature, investors view firms with high organization capital as risker and demand additional risk premia. Similar to Eisfeldt and Papanikolaou (2013), we find that firms in the Stock Exchange of Thailand with highest organization capital earn abnormal returns of 0.75% per month relative to the four‐factor asset pricing model. In addition, we also document that the organization capital risk premium is more relevant for service firms than non‐service ones.     

Origin of Foreign Direct Investment and Firm Performance: Evidence from Foreign Acquisitions of Chinese Domestic Firms

Using a newly created panel of domestic Chinese firms who receive foreign direct investment (FDI), this paper finds that Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)‐acquired firms outperform those acquired by investors from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan (HMT). To control for possible endogeneity of the FDI decision, I employ propensity score matching combined with a difference‐in‐differences approach. The results indicate that relative to HMT‐acquired firms, OECD‐acquired firms experience significantly higher productivity in the initial year of acquisition and this productivity differential persists in subsequent years, reaching 27.8 per cent by the third year. Further, OECD‐acquired firms exhibit higher profits, average wages and capital per worker compared to HMT‐acquired firms. These results suggest that the origin of the foreign investor differentially affects target firm performance.     

The Regulation of Professional Migration: Insights from the Health and IT Sectors in ASEAN

This paper develops several indicators to measure the extent and depth of rules governing international migration. It is set in the context of moves towards further liberalisation of services trade and associated labour mobility (Mode 4) under GATS and related regional trading arrangements. Ten Southeast Asian countries at various stages of economic development are examined as a case study, with special reference to health care and information technology. These sectors are priority sectors for regional cooperation in services trade in ASEAN, but were expected to represent opposite extremes in terms of the regulation of migration. The study finds that the more advanced countries tend to have more liberal regimes for international movements of skilled manpower, although there were smaller differences regarding general visa and work permit arrangements. Generic restrictions on mobility were related to trade policies, as well as to direct barriers (often country‐specific) to migration. They included minimum salary requirement, levies on foreign workers, economic needs tests, and limitations related to language, education and job experience. Controls were more extensive in the health care sector, related to social considerations as well as professional organisational interests.     

International Exploitation of Domestic R&D Exploration: New Insights from Russian Manufacturing Firms

In this paper, we approach R&D cooperation and international market expansion from an exploration-exploitation perspective and look how various domestic R&D partners affect international market expansion activities in Russian firms. Our findings, based on a data survey of 206 manufacturing companies, show that different partners affect differently when it comes to market expansion and that their effect depends on a number of things such as the proximity of the international market. Using the exploration-exploitation approach, we are able to explain the phenomenon in more detail and so contribute to the existing international business and innovation management literature.     

Reexamining the Expected Effect of Available Resources and Firm Size on Firm Environmental Orientation: An Empirical Study of UK Firms

An emergent body of literature examined why some firms apply some environmental initiatives while other firms do not take responsibility for their natural environment? Thus, firm environmental orientation (responsiveness and performance) are linked in the literature to several variables. Unfortunately, the relationship between firm environmental orientation and either available resources or firm size showed mixed results and inconclusive evidence. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to show empirically how available resources and firm size can explain differences in firm environmental responsiveness and environmental performance. Econometric results of environmental responsiveness using the logistic regression model demonstrated that firm size does appear to add something unique in explaining differences in environmental responsiveness while available resource can be safely dropped from the model. However, econometric analysis of environmental performance using the maximum-likelihood random effects model showed strong evidence that available resources and firm size are significant predictors of firm environmental performance.