International dimensions of management: The trans-national efficacy of a venture development model

Entrepreneurship is commonly held to be a vital force in the US and other economies. Yet, little is known regarding the efficacy of entrepreneurial efforts developed in one country but attempted elsewhere. In response to calls for testable theoretical models, scholars have begun to investigate empirically the attendant phenomena associated with the venture development process. This article describes efforts to test in another nation a nine-stage entrepreneurial process model of venture development derived and validated in the USA. While some development stages appear to exist similarly across borders, others may not be present. Further, the sequence of stages in the US-derived model may differ when compared internationally.     

Money Allocation to Out-of-Home Leisure Activities and the Organization of These Activities in Time and Space

Monetary budgets influence activity participation and related travel as they demarcate limits on how people organize their activities in time and space. In this paper, we are interested in money allocation to out-of-home leisure activities and how this is affected by duration, sociodemographics, and time-location variables. Analyses were carried out by applying a seemingly unrelated regression model to a leisure activity data set. The analyses revealed that expenditures for out-of-home leisure activities are influenced by the variables mentioned above. Moreover, the results indicate that there is a substitution between expenditure of each activity.     

The Effects of Competition in Short Product Life‐Cycle Markets: The Case of Motion Pictures*

It is critically important to understand the relationship between new product launch strategies and their interaction with the competitive environment, which results in the successful introduction of new products. Deciding when to launch new products is among the most significant issues facing managers when formulating new products strategy, especially for products with short product life cycles. However, little extant research has focused on the interaction of product launch timing and the competitive market environment. This study explores the effects of four types of competitive threats on the market performance of short product life‐cycle products. Threats from new products and incumbents are possible. Also, products in the same category and those in related product categories exert competitive pressures. In this paper, a framework of competitive threats is developed, and research questions are constructed and empirically tested using the motion pictures industry as the focus of this research. A set of simultaneous equations was estimated using a sample of 2,948 movies introduced in the U.S. market between 1997 and 2004. The results show that all competition types have negative direct, indirect (as mediated by distribution intensity), and total effects on the performance of a new product. For a focal product, incumbent products exert a greater negative impact on performance than new entrants. Surprisingly, products in different, but related, categories are more harmful to the performance of products than products in the same category. The results have important implications for launch timing and new product performance.     

Steindl's Contribution to the Theory of Industry Concentration

Over a period of some fifty years from the early 1940s until his death in 1993, Josef Steindl developed and expounded a theory of industry concentration. His analysis deals explicitly with differences in costs and demand among firms producing similar products. These differences lead to differences in firm growth, so that his analysis is dynamic. Thus, it provides a constructive alternative to the emphasis in the neoclassical mainstream on static equilibrium with identical firms. In the present paper, Steindl's analysis is subjected to a critical appraisal. Shortcomings of the analysis are noted, its links with other approaches to the theory of industry concentration are identified and directions for further development are indicated.     

Liquidity Constraints and Investment in Transition Economies

We use Bulgarian firm-level data to investigate the impact of liquidity constraints on investment performance. Internal funds are an important determinant of investment in most industrialized countries. We test whether internal funds are important for firm investment during the current transition process in Bulgaria. We use a simple accelerator model of investment to test whether liquidity constraints are relevant in the case of Bulgaria. Our estimations are based on data for the period 1993–95, prior to the Bulgarian financial crisis in 1996–97. It turns out that Bulgarian firms are liquidity constrained, and that firms' size and financial structure help to distinguish between firms that are more and less liquidity constrained. In our view, liquidity constraints can be given a different interpretation in the case of transition economies as compared to Western economies. A more in depth analysis of the data reveals that liquidity constraints, and consequently the access to external funds for Bulgarian firm investment, are to be seen against the background of soft-budget constraints and the failure of the financial system to enforce an efficient allocation of funds. In our view, the lack of liquidity constraints may actually be seen as a sign of financial weakness in the case of Bulgaria.     

Valuing and hedging fixed rate mortgage commitments

A fixed rate loan commitment that is binding on the lender but not on the loan applicant is equivalent to a put option. This article uses the Black-Scholes option pricing model to establish a value for fixed rate loan commitments and to derive the hedge ratio for the lending institution to hedge the interest rate risk associated with the commitments in the FHLMC forward market for mortgages. The effectiveness of the resulting hedge is tested in a simulation, where it is found that the result is a 71% reduction in the variance of the value of the lender's gain or loss associated with the commitment period.