In this paper, we advance and test the idea that innovation and export are complementary strategies for SMEs' growth. We argue that innovation and export positively reinforce each other in a dynamic ...virtuous circle, and we identify and describe the process through which this complementarity relationship takes place. Participating in export markets can promote firms' learning, and thus enhance innovation performance. At the same time, through innovation, firms can enter new geographical markets with novel and better products, therefore making exports more successful, and, by the same token, they can also improve the quality - and consequently increase the sales - of the products sold domestically. We test our theory using an unbalanced panel of Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 1990-1999. We find robust empirical support for our hypothesis: consistent with the presence of complementarity, we show that the positive effect of innovation activity on firms' growth rate is higher for firms that also engage in exports, and vice versa. Furthermore, we show that, Ceteris paribus, firms' adoption of one growth strategy (e.g., entering export markets) positively influences the adoption of the other (e.g., innovation).
All fourteen major peacebuilding missions launched between 1989 and 1999 shared a common strategy for consolidating peace after internal conflicts: immediate democratization and marketization. ...Transforming war-shattered states into market democracies is basically sound, but pushing this process too quickly can have damaging and destabilizing effects. The process of liberalization is inherently tumultuous, and can undermine the prospects for stable peace. A more sensible approach to post-conflict peacebuilding would seek, first, to establish a system of domestic institutions that are capable of managing the destabilizing effects of democratization and marketization within peaceful bounds and only then phase in political and economic reforms slowly, as conditions warrant. Peacebuilders should establish the foundations of effective governmental institutions prior to launching wholesale liberalization programs. Avoiding the problems that marred many peacebuilding operations in the 1990s will require longer-lasting and, ultimately, more intrusive forms of intervention in the domestic affairs of these states. This book was first published in 2004.
We investigate Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick's (2003) finding that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant stock market underperformance. If the relation between poor governance and poor ...returns is causal, we expect that the market is negatively surprised by the poor operating performance of weak governance firms. We find that firms with weak shareholder rights exhibit significant operating underperformance. However, analysts' forecast errors and earnings announcement returns show no evidence that this underperformance surprises the market. Our results are robust to controls for takeover activity. Overall, our results do not support the hypothesis that weak governance causes poor stock returns.
"We estimate the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of different types of government-sponsored training in West Germany using particularly rich data that allows us to control for selectivity by ...matching methods and to measure interesting outcome variables over eight years after a program's start. We use distance-weighted radius matching together with a bias removal procedure based on weighted regressions in order to increase the precision and robustness of standard matching estimators. We find negative employment effects in the short term for all program types, effects whose magnitude and persistence is directly related to program duration. In the longer term, training seems to increase employment rates by 10 - 20 percentage points. For most programs the longer-term positive effects seem to be sustainable over the eight-year observation period." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Evaluation; anwendungsorientiert. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1975 bis 2002.
During the decade of the 1990s the number of women serving on corporate boards increased substantially. Over this decade, we show that the likelihood of a firm adding a woman to its board in a given ...year is negatively affected by the number of woman already on the board. The probability of adding a woman is materially increased when a female director departs the board. Adding a director, therefore, is clearly not gender neutral. Although we find that women tend to serve on better performing firms, we also document insignificant abnormal returns on the announcement of a woman added to the board. Rather than the demand for women directors being performance based, our results suggest corporations responding to either internal or external calls for diversity.
This study demonstrates that in a time of massive change characterized by the emergence of entirely new political systems and a fundamental reorganization of economic life, systematic patterns of ...economic conditions affecting election results at the aggregate level can in fact be identified during the first decade of post-communist elections in five post-communist countries: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. A variety of theoretical arguments concerning the conditions in which these effects are more or less likely to be present are also proposed and tested. Analysis is conducted using an original data set of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral indicators, and features both broadly based comparative assessments of the findings across all twenty elections as well as more focused case study analyses of pairs of individual elections.
Using a thematic text analysis of the initial letters to shareholders following a CEO succession event, we analyze whether CEO charismatic visions portrayed in this organizational discourse influence ...securities analysts' recommendations and forecasts. The results suggest that such projections of CEO charismatic visions are associated with the favorability of individual analyst recommendations and the uniformity of recommendations across analysts, but they also appear to be positively related to errors in individual analysts' forecasting of future firm performance.
While most countries are committed to increasing access to safe water and thereby reducing child mortality, there is little consensus on how to actually improve water services. One important proposal ...under discussion is whether to privatize water provision. In the 1990s Argentina embarked on one of the largest privatization campaigns in the world, including the privatization of local water companies covering approximately 30 percent of the country’s municipalities. Using the variation in ownership of water provision across time and space generated by the privatization process, we find that child mortality fell 8 percent in the areas that privatized their water services and that the effect was largest (26 percent) in the poorest areas. We check the robustness of these estimates using cause‐specific mortality. While privatization is associated with significant reductions in deaths from infectious and parasitic diseases, it is uncorrelated with deaths from causes unrelated to water conditions.
In this study of how daily newspapers in America have developed electronic publishing ventures, Pablo Boczkowski shows that new media emerge not just in a burst of revolutionary technological change ...but by merging the structures and practices of existing media with newly available technical capabilities. His multi-disciplinary perspectives of science and technology, communication, and organization studies allow him to address the connections between technical, editorial, and work facets of new media. This approach yields analytical insights into the material culture of online newsrooms, the production processes of new media products, and the relationships between offline and online dynamics.
Boczkowski traces daily newspapers' early consumer-oriented non-print publishing initiatives, from the now-forgotten videotex efforts of the 1980s to the rise of the World Wide Web in the mid- 1990s. He then examines the formative years of news on the Web during the second half of the 1990s, when the content of online newspapers varied from simple reproduction of the print edition to new material with interactive and multimedia features. With this picture of the recent history of non-print publishing as background, Boczkowski provides ethnographic, fly-on-the-wall accounts of three innovations in content creation: the Technology section of the New York Times on the Web, which was initially intended as the newspaper's space for experimentation with online news; the Virtual Voyager project of the HoustonChronicle.com, in which reporters pushed the envelope of multimedia journalism; and the Community Connection initiative of New Jersey Online, in which users became content producers. His analyses of these ventures reveal how innovation in online newspapers became an ongoing process in which different combinations of initial conditions and local contingencies led publishers along divergent paths of content creation.
Government regulation of firms is associated with more negative externalities and unofficial activity across countries. I argue that this correlation mainly reflects causality going from concerns ...about market failures to demand for government intervention. Using trust in others as a proxy for such concerns, I show that differences in trust explain a great deal of variation in entry regulations. Then, controlling for trust in the regression of market failures on regulation, the latter is no longer associated with worse economic outcomes. The same result is confirmed when I exploit country population as an alternative source of variation in regulation.
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