Exploring the potential of SMEs to build individual,organizational, and community resilience through sustainability-oriented business practices

Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can have significant resources, capacities, and influence in their communities, suggesting they have the potential to be agents for transformative sustainability. However, SMEs will need to move beyond firm-centered sustainable business practices towards strategic approaches that encompass and contribute to resilience-building processes. Amid the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic, we explored what types of sustainable business practices of SMEs can contribute to individual, organizational, and community resilience. We identified six clusters of practice that are important in this regard. The clusters are not solely technical or “environmental” but rather illustrative of deeper sustainable values shaped by organizational structure, culture, and behavior. This paper suggests that SMEs can pursue transformative approaches to sustainability that are more environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable and better able to withstand shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic and can be significant contributors to community resilience. We conclude with a series of future research priorities critical to examine a largely unexplored nexus in the private sector, the linkages and dynamics between sustainability practice, resilience building, and broader community pathways.     

The effect of competitive intensity on the relationship between strategic entrepreneurship and organizational results

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Although the field of strategic entrepreneurship has received much attention in recent years, the relationship of strategic entrepreneurship...     

GROUPED VARIATION IN FACTOR SHARES: AN APPLICATION TO MISALLOCATION

A striking feature of microlevel plant data is the presence of significant variation in factor cost shares across plants within an industry. We develop a methodology based on cluster analysis to decompose cost shares into idiosyncratic and group-specific components. We apply our methodology to Chilean plant-level data and find that group-specific variation accounts for approximately one-third of the variation in cost shares. We study the implications of these groups in cost shares on the gains from eliminating misallocation. We place bounds on their importance and find that ignoring them can overstate the gains from eliminating misallocation by up to one-third .     

Robust effects of a debt-financed tax cut in an economy with incomplete markets

International Tax and Public Finance - We propose a two-period pure-exchange economy with spot and nominal security markets and a government that enacts a debt-financed tax cut in the first period...