Institutional diversity characterizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from emerging economies holds critical but under-examined implications for their internationalization activities. Different types ...of SOEs can exhibit distinct motivations, strategic resources, and adaptive capabilities for penetrating foreign markets. To understand how such idiosyncratic differences emerge, we conceptualize the heterogeneity of SOEs as an outcome of multiple institutional reform processes – administrative and fiscal decentralization, industrial restructuring, and market liberalization – which create diversity between SOEs affiliated with central and local levels of government. Building on the idea of "institutions-asconfigurations", we elucidate how such reforms reconfigure SOEs' constellation of resources, capabilities, and priorities which shape the parameters of their ability to negotiate for home and host country institutional legitimacy. Specifically, we propose that the restructuring of central SOEs into "national champions" exposes them to stronger institutional pressures from home and host country governments while local SOEs which have fewer obligations to serve national strategic prerogatives display greater managerial autonomy and market orientation, but lower levels of monopolistic behavior. We discuss how such contrasting attributes contribute to variations in SOEs' international business diversification patterns, foreign subsidiary establishment and ownership modes, and overseas location preferences. Recognition of SOEs' organizational diversity holds important implications for theories on state-owned multinationals.
This article contributes to the development of state capitalism as a reflexively critical project focusing on the morphology of present-day capitalism, and particularly on the changing role of the ...state. We bring analytical clarity to state capitalism studies by offering a rigorous definition of its object of investigation, and by demonstrating how the category state capitalism can be productively construed as a means of problematising the current aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the world economy. Noting some of the geographical shortcomings of the field, we outline an alternative research agenda ‘uneven and combined state capitalist development’ which aims at spatialising the study of state capitalism and revitalising systemic explanations of the phenomenon. Rather than the negation of an abstract model of free-market capitalism, or the rise of a nationally scaled variant of capitalism, we posit contemporary state capitalism as a global process of restructuring of the capitalist state (including in its liberal form) underpinned by secular transformations in the materiality of surplus-value production, such as the consolidation of new international divisions of labour driven by automation and labour-saving technologies. The political mediation of these transformations results in the combined expansion of state-capital hybrids and of muscular forms of statism, which develop in inter-referential and cumulative forms across territory, producing further state capitalist modalities. This is a particularly potent dynamic in contemporary state capitalism, and its tendency to develop in a spiral that both shapes and is shaped by world capitalist development.
This book presents, compares, and develops various techniques for estimating market power - the ability to set price profitably above marginal cost - and strategies - the game-theoretic plans used by ...firms to compete with rivals. The authors start by examining static model approaches to estimating market power. They extend the analysis to dynamic models. Finally, they develop methods to estimate firms' strategies directly and examine how these strategies determine market power. A detailed technical appendix reviews the relevant information-theoretic and other econometric models that are used throughout. Questions and detailed answers for students and researchers are provided in the book for easy use.
Using a 2015–2019 sample of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed companies and the difference-in-differences method, this paper analyzes the effect of the implementation of China's environmental tax ...in 2018 on firms' environmental investments. The results show a significant increase in firms' environmental investments after the implementation of the tax. Further analyses examine variations in the effect according to ownership type, regional economic development level, and media attention. The positive effect is more significant for state-owned companies and companies subject to high media attention, but there is no obvious difference between companies in regions with different levels of economic development. Additional analysis reveals that government subsidies negatively affect firms' environmental investments, but the environmental tax reduces such subsidies and thus their inhibitory effect, increasing firms' environmental investments. Additionally, the results show that the environmental tax promotes firms' performance by increasing their environmental investments. This paper provides theoretical support and empirical evidence for the implementation and improvement of the environmental tax policy.
•This paper finds a significant increase in firms' environmental investments after the implementation of the tax.•The positive effect is more significant for state-owned companies and companies subject to high media attention.•This paper also tries to reveal the mechanism of environmental tax on firms' performance by increasing their environmental investments.•This paper provides theoretical support and empirical evidence for the implementation and improvement of the environmental tax policy.
Innovation is generally viewed as something inherently good, a source of progress and prosperity in our society. But innovation can also have negative, unintended, and wasteful effects, if policies ...are misdirected and organizations pursue innovation to look good and convey a message, rather than to actually achieve improvements of technologies, services, and products. This book makes the case that innovation has become a buzzword, a political cure-all, and increasingly an empty phrase, and that this has become detrimental to innovation itself. Governmental (and supra-governmental) innovation policy is often unrealistically phrased and shaped, and corporate innovation projects are not seldom meaningless acts of window-dressing. The book describes the problems this presents for society, organizations, and individuals, and seeks explanations for why it has come to be this way. Giving way to a more realistic view of what innovation really is, and how it can be accomplished, the book develops a multifaceted sociological and historical argument where several complementary reasons for the prevalence of “empty innovation” are proposed. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and all those with an interest in the failures of current innovation strategies. This is an open access book.
Industry 4.0 for SMEs Matt, Dominik T; Modrak, Vladimir; Zsifkovits, Helmut
2020, 2020-01-03
eBook
Open access
This open access book explores the concept of Industry 4.0, which presents a considerable challenge for the production and service sectors. While digitization initiatives are usually integrated into ...the central corporate strategy of larger companies, smaller firms often have problems putting Industry 4.0 paradigms into practice. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) possess neither the human nor financial resources to systematically investigate the potential and risks of introducing Industry 4.0. Addressing this obstacle, the international team of authors focuses on the development of smart manufacturing concepts, logistics solutions and managerial models specifically for SMEs. Aiming to provide methodological frameworks and pilot solutions for SMEs during their digital transformation, this innovative and timely book will be of great use to scholars researching technology management, digitization and small business, as well as practitioners within manufacturing companies.
We examine the association between borrower (firm) and lender (bank) state ownership and accounting conservatism for a sample of Chinese firms. We hypothesize that state-owned enterprises (SOEs) ...adopt less conservative accounting than non-state-owned enterprises (NSOEs) because lenders are less concerned with downside risk for SOEs than for NSOEs. We also hypothesize a negative relation between conservatism and the fraction of total loans a firm borrows from state-owned banks (SBs) because SBs have weaker demand for assurance of sufficient net assets to cover loan repayments than non-state-owned banks (NSBs). We find support for both hypotheses. Further analyses reveal that: (1) firms that borrow from commercial SBs exhibit more conservative accounting than firms that borrow from policy SBs and (2) firms adopt more conservative accounting as they get more loans from banks with foreign ownership or exclusively foreign banks. However, the results of these additional analyses are to some extent sensitive to alternative measures of accounting conservatism.
This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Business, ICSOB 2023, which was held in Lahti, Finland, during November 27–29, 2023. The ...special theme of ICSOB 2023 was Digital Agility: Mastering Change in Software Business and Digital Services. The 27 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: Requirements; software procurement; platforms, ecosystems and data; artificial intelligence; software startups; software product management; software and business co-development; and emerging digital world.
•We examine the effect of banking competition on SMEs’ credit constraints in China.•Lower banking market concentration alleviates financing constraints of SMEs.•The joint-stock banks have a larger ...effect than the city commercial banks.•The joint-stock banks have a larger effect than the state-owned banks.•The effect is through prices rather than the offering of relationship lending.
Banking competition may enhance or hinder the financing of small and medium-sized enterprises. Using a survey on the financing of such enterprises in China, combined with detailed bank branch information, we investigate how concentration in local banking market affects the availability of credit. We find that lower market concentration alleviates financing constraints. The widespread presence of joint-stock banks has a larger effect on alleviating these constraints, than the presence of city commercial banks, while the presence of state-owned banks has a smaller effect.
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