COVID-19 Regulations,Political Institutions,and the Environment

Environmental and Resource Economics - The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with short-term air quality improvements in many countries around the world. We study whether the degree of democracy and...     

Discussion of “inventory policy, accruals quality and information risk”

Krishnan et al. (Review of Accouting Studies, 2008) investigate how the choice of LIFO versus FIFO affects firms’ accruals quality and cost of capital. The authors show that LIFO firms have better accruals quality and lower cost of capital than FIFO firms and that the cost of capital effect associated with the inventory valuation method is not subsumed by differences either in fundamental risk or accruals quality between LIFO and FIFO firms. This discussion is focused on key design choices and underlying assumptions.     

How technology teachers understand technological knowledge

Swedish technology teachers’ views of technological knowledge are examined through a written survey and a series of interviews. The study indicates that technology teachers’ understandings of what constitutes technological knowledge and how it is justified vary considerably. The philosophical discussions on the topic are unknown to them. This lack of a proper framework for what constitutes technological knowledge and how it is justified might affect both how curricula are interpreted and how pupils’ knowledge is assessed.     

Dynamics of relationships and networks — creation, maintenance and destruction as managerial challenges

This paper introduces the topic of dynamics in business networks as the overarching theme of the special issue. We first discuss the nature of stability and change in business relationships and industrial networks. Then, we highlight the paradox that stability and change are not opposing ends of a scale but co-existing and influencing each other. Finally, the contributions of this special issue are presented.     

An operationalization of Stevenson's conceptualization of entrepreneurship as opportunity‐based firm behavior

Stevenson (1983) holds that entrepreneurial management, defined as a set of opportunity‐based management practices, can help firms remain vital and contribute to firm and societal level value creation. While his conceptualization has received much attention, little progress has been made because of a lack of empirical tools to examine his propositions. This article seeks to resolve this by describing a new instrument that was developed specifically for operationalizing Stevenson's conceptualization. After two pre‐tests, the instrument was tested full scale on a very large (1200+ cases) stratified random sample of firms with different size, governance structure, and industry affiliation. The results show that both in the full sample and in various sub‐samples it was possible to identify six sub‐dimensions with high discriminant validity and moderate to high reliability, which represent dimensions of Stevenson's theoretical reasoning. We label these Strategic Orientation, Resource Orientation, Management Structure, Reward Philosophy, Growth Orientation and Entrepreneurial Culture. We were further able to show that these dimensions only partly overlap with ‘Entrepreneurial Orientation’, the hitherto best established empirical instrument for assessing a firm's degree of entrepreneurship. Our instrument should open up opportunities for researchers to further evaluate entrepreneurship in existing firms. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.