The development of critical capabilities in foreign subsidiaries: disentangling the role of the subsidiary’s business network

Within business literature in general, capabilities have advanced to the prime determinant of the corporation’s economic rents. Within international business literature, it is further assumed that multinational corporations can enhance their pool of capabilities through foreign subsidiaries. Foreign subsidiaries are seen as means to assimilate new capabilities from their local, external network and integrate these capabilities into the multinational corporation. Data from more than 2000 foreign subsidiaries shows that some foreign units actually are endowed with superior capabilities which are useful for other corporate entities. It is argued that the development of critical capabilities within these subsidiaries is driven not only by internal corporate actors, but also by external actors. The analysis provides evidence that the role of different internal and external network partners for capability development varies according to the functional activity under consideration. Thus, subsidiaries benefit from various internal and external network actors in very different ways. The contribution ends with some conclusions and some avenues for future research.     

Bargaining, binding contracts, and competitive wages

In a model where many workers bargain with one firm and sign binding contracts, we show existence of a stationary subgame perfect equilibrium. If the production function satisfies decreasing returns, each worker receives a share of his marginal product (treating all other workers as employed) in equilibrium. Thus, wages are competitive. This is in contrast to Stole and Zweibel (1996, Rev. Econ. Stud. 63, 375–410), who assume that contracts are non-binding and find that the payoff of a worker is a weighted average of the inframarginal contributions. Hence, binding contracts imply lower wages than non-binding contracts.     

Assessing the contribution of public capital to private production: Evidence from the German manufacturing sector

Using time-series cross-section data from the manufacturing sector of the 11 West German 'Bundesländer' (Federal States) from 1970 to 1996, I examine the impact of public capital on private production. My econometric analysis explicitly takes into account four of the most frequent specification issues in the context of time-series crosssection data analysis: serial correlation, groupwise heteroscedasticity, cross-sectional correlation and non-stationarity of data. For all approaches and tested specifications, I find that public capital is a significant input for production in the manufacturing sector. Moreover, I find that differences in public capital endowment can explain long-term differences in productivity across the Bundesländer. One tentative conclusion that can be drawn from this finding is that differences in public capital endowment might also explain a part of the still-existing productivity gap between manufacturing in East and West Germany. However, I emphasise that the existence of positive effects of public capital on private production is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for concluding that public investments should be boosted in the future.     

The Cultural Dimension of Technology Management: Lessons from the History of the Automobile

This article criticizes traditional innovation strategies for focusing too one-sidedly on technological matters. By applying the concept of 'cultural ambience', the authors attempt to show that new technologies stand a larger chance of being introduced on a large scale if, on the one hand, they can be made to fit into existing organizational networks and legal structures and, on the other hand, they are compatible with firmly established routines and perceptions. Regardless of the degree of novelty aimed at, engineers and managers have to pay attention to non-technical factors. Technology management is always cultural management. The thesis of the article is supported by brief narrative analyses of four so-called alternative automobile projects: the NSU rotary-engine car, GM's EV1, a Norwegian electric vehicle and the recently launched Smart car.     

Signaling Power of Open Market Share Repurchases in Germany

This paper shows that abnormal stock price returns around the date of open market repurchase announcements are four times higher in Germany than in the USA (12 ver. 3%). We hypothesize that this observation can be explained by national differences in repurchase regulations. Our empirical evidence indicates that German managers primarily buy back shares to signal an undervaluation of their firm. We demonstrate that the stringent repurchase process prescribed by German law attributes a higher credibility to undervaluation signals than do the lax US regulations, and thereby corroborates our hypothesis.Financial support from the E-Finance Lab, Frankfurt am Main, and from Freitag & Co., Frankfurt am Main, is gratefully acknowledged. We would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments     

Contract Renegotiation with Time-Varying Valuations

The paper characterizes optimal renegotiation-proof rental contracts in a model with adverse selection and hidden information. It generalizes the work of Hart and Tirole (1988) to the case of time-varying valuations. The paper considers a durable-goods monopolist who serves a nonanonymous buyer with time-varying valuation for the seller's good. The buyer's valuation has a persistent and a transient component; both are private information. The paper shows that for some range of prior beliefs the seller strictly prefers leasing to selling.     

Budgetdefizit und Leistungsbilanzsaldo: Ein weiterer Kommentar

Summary In this comment we point out that a consistent policy cannot rely solely on the instrument of demand management to attain internal and external stability simultaneously.