From global start-ups to the borderless firm: Why and how to build a worldwide value system

Although the original concept of international new ventures included the geographic configuration of value activities, the subsequent development of the literature has gradually abandoned the concern about the geographic configuration of both input sourcing and output marketing to concentrate almost exclusively on the latter. Therefore, this paper argues that there is a need to re-focus the research so as to figure out how and why some companies are borderless. Borderless firms are defined as the result of the combination, early on, of geographically dispersed resources and capabilities, defying the home-base logic. A borderless firm presents the following characteristics (or a combination of them) from inception (or shortly thereafter): (i) value-added activities dispersed across different countries and regions; (ii) entrepreneurs not bounded by a home base; (iii) multinational founders and/or management teams; and (iv) a multinational workforce. To enquiry into this issue, the study uses five case studies of borderless firms. The results advance the understanding of the motives and processes behind the development, early on, of a borderless configuration of value activities.     

Participating in Business-to-Business Trade Fairs: Does the Buying Function Matter?

This research aims at understanding the main reasons for business-to-business trade fair participation and for visitors' interaction with suppliers. The nature of the study is exploratory and combines qualitative interviews with trade fair organizers, experts, and trade fair participants, and a survey administered to visitors of an international trade fair held in Portugal. The study revealed that visitors do not highlight buying at these events and the most experienced visitors are the ones who devalue most buying at trade fairs. Interestingly, even when considering the most important supplier with whom visitors have interacted, they do not underline using the trade fair context to place orders. Such conclusion allows drawing managerial implications for trade fair participants and organizers.     

Joint estimation using revealed and stated preference data: An application using a national forest

We combine contingent behaviour with travel cost data to estimate the change in the recreational use value of a National Forest due to quality and price changes. Instead of the usual improvement scenario, a hypothetical deterioration in the conditions of the forest due to a fire is considered. A dataset containing five observations for each respondent enabled the estimation of three models for which the number of scenarios differed. The results show that visitors are sensitive to price and quality changes and that in the forest fire scenario the intended number of trips would be reduced and that respondents would experience a welfare loss. Signs of inconsistency between preferences expressed by revealed and intended behaviour were found. This research also provides some indications that strategic bias affects answers to price changes.     

Development of the banking system under the Estonian currency board

The choice of a suitable exchange rate regime is the subject of numerous discussions in economic literature. Estonia has been successful in achieving economic stabilization and growth and steadily declining inflation. It has one of the highest per capita foreign direct investments in central and eastern Europe. Estonia also has one of the most liberalized economies among all transition countries. An essential element of the success of Estonian economic development is strict exchange rate control. Estonia has adopted a currency board that serves as a signal of commitment to prudent monetary policy and as a guarantee of sound money during the transition period. This paper discusses the experience of operating the currency board, some future prospects of the currency board arrangement, and the development of the banking system in Estonia.     

浦东开发“一号工程”

浦东开发基础设施建设先行,杨高路工程就是当年浦东开发的“一号工程”。2013年夏天,一个炎热的下午,我前往南京西路城市航站楼采访刚从上海机场(集团)有限公司董事长、党委副书记岗位上退下来的吴念祖同志,请他谈谈当年指挥杨高路工程建设的情况。吴念祖动情地说,时间过得真快,一眨眼21年过去了,当年指挥杨高路工程建设时难忘的人和事仍历历在目。那段“激情燃烧的岁月”,永远铭刻在他心中,成为人生的重要财富。     

Individualization and Marketization of Responsibility for Gender Equality: The Case of Female Managers in China

This article investigates the question of where the responsibility for promoting gender equality resides in the Chinese employment context. Utilizing Acker's (2006) inequality regimes framework, the study explores women's underrepresentation in management roles in China and explains the persistence of gender inequalities in managerial echelons of Chinese organizations. Based on 30 interviews with female managers, the findings demonstrate the marketization and individualization of gender equality in organizational activity. The existing gender inequality, and the lack of responsibility for tackling it, has been either legitimized by eluding to the commercial‐only focus of organizations or rendered invisible through a belief in individual choice as the determining factor of career progression for women. Gender inequality in management is also maintained through the compliance of female managers themselves with the presumed legitimacy of gender‐based differential access to managerial roles. References to culture and tradition, market forces, competitive pressures, and individual choices by female managers are often made in explaining the unequal career paths and outcomes for men and women in their organizations. Our findings contribute to the human resource management (HRM) literature by framing macrosocietal context as a dynamic and endogenous aspect of management of human resources in organizations and provide novel insights into the interplay between HRM and societal context. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Regulatory Distortions in a Competitive Financial Services Industry

This paper focusses on the interaction between regulation and competition in a simple industrial organization model. We analyze how regulation affects the profitability of financial institutions. We find that information asymmetries impose a heavy regulatory burden on the higher-quality banks, highlighting the importance of fine-tuning regulation. Our other main results point at the importance of a level playing field.     

What do we know about the capital structure of small firms?

Firm data from ten Western European countries is used in this paper to contrast the sources of leverage across small and large, as well as across listed and unlisted firms. Specifically, the explanatory power of firm-specific, country of incorporation institutional, and macroeconomic factors is evaluated. Using data that is more comprehensive in coverage than that used in the existing research the stylized facts of the capital structure literature for large and listed firms is confirmed, but contrasting evidence is obtained for smaller companies. First, the country of incorporation carries much more information for small firms, supporting the idea that small firms are more financially constrained and face non-firm-specific hurdles in their capital structure choice. Second, using two different leverage measures it is shown that the relationship of firm size and tangibility to leverage is robust to the measure used for listed, but not for unlisted firms.