Partner Selection for International Marketing and Distribution in Corporate New Ventures

The software industry offers numerous options for a firm to arrange its international marketing activities. Although a prominent way to enter the international market is through co-operation, there is a limited amount of research regarding partner selection. The purpose of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurial corporate new ventures use partners in their international marketing. A representative case study is used to illustrate the partner selection and evaluation process in the software industry. Our findings indicate that small entrepreneurial firms can and should use partners in their internationalization. However, a more analytical approach to their selection is needed.     

“Watch that Space! The County Hierarchy in Firm Births and Deaths in the UK, 1980–1999”

The paper investigates the relationships between registrations, de-registrations and population density at county level in the UK using VAT data for 20 years over the period 1980–1999. The rationale for this is based on the need to understand how the extent to which, in different parts of the UK, differences in the relationship between birth rates and death rates combine to produce an interpretable pattern in net birth rates. The analysis of the net birth rate shows that a strategy aimed at the net birth rate might, in principle, just as well aim at reducing business failure, rather than raising the birth rate. Indeed this might be more efficient, since it implies that less start-ups are “wasted^” as it would avoid the necessity, if targets are to be reached, of encouraging those individuals who are patently unsuited to running their own business into business ownership.     

On the marketing of IPOs

Derrien [2005. Journal of Finance 60, 487–521] and Ljungqvist et al. [2006. Journal of Business] build upon the work of Miller [1977. Journal of Finance 32, 1151–1168] and claim that issuers and the regular customers of investment bankers benefit from the presence of sentiment investors (noise traders) in the market for an initial public offering (IPO). Thus we argue that investment bankers have an incentive to promote an IPO to induce sentiment investors into the market for it. Consistent with this motivation and these models, we expect that the promotional efforts of investment bankers should influence the compensation of investment bankers, the valuation of an IPO, its initial returns and trading, the wealth gains of insider shareholders, and the likelihood that an issuer switches investment bankers for a subsequent seasoned equity offering. Examining data for a sample of IPOs from 1993 through 2000, we find evidence consistent with these predictions and so with the proposition that an investment banker's ability to market an IPO to sentiment investors is important.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Role of the Medium of Exchange in Mergers

In empirical studies of differences between firms which are acquired and those which are not, researchers typically divide firms into two groups-acquired and nonacquired. In this paper, we argue that cash takeovers may be sufficiently different from noncash acquisitionst hat failure to distinguish between them may lead to inappropriateg eneralizations. We provide evidence from the mid 1970s that three categories of firms can be distinguished:n onacquireda, cquiredi n a cash takeover, and acquired in an exchange of securities.     

Mimicking Portfolios and Exact Arbitrage Pricing

We characterize the sets of mimicking positions with returns that can serve in place of factors in an exact K-factor arbitrage-pricing relation for a set of N assets. All of the sets are K-dimensional nonsingular linear transformations of each other. We interpret three examples of such transformations and discuss empirical considerations. We provide conditions under which the mimicking positions can be expressed as portfolios, and we characterize the relation between mimicking portfolios and the minimum-variance frontier.     

A regional forecasting model for construction activity

This paper presents a new, comprehensive and detailed model of construction activity. The model is intended primarily for forecasting applications. The model generates forecasts of new construction starts for each of the 50 states of the United States. Forecasts are made for 29 types of structures. The paper presents evidence that the structure of the determinants of construction activity varies across regions within the United States. Thus, prior models of construction, based only on national time-series data, may be subject to aggregation bias. Evaluation of the model's forecasts indicates that the model outperforms simpler forecasting methods.