angel investors around the world we document that the choice between disintermediated individual angel investments and intermediated private equity and venture capital investments depends on legal economic and cultural differences we find evidence of this using pitchbook s comprehensive data on more than 5000 angel and 80 000 private equity and venture capital investments in 96 countries from 1977 to 2012 the data further indicate that investee firms funded by angels are less likely to successfully exit through either an ipo or an acquisition these findings are robust to propensity score matching methods as well as to clustering standard errors and excluding u s observations among other approaches

the making of a construct lessons from 30 years of the kogut and singh cultural distance index the 30 year anniversary of kogut and singh s 1988 groundbreaking study that introduced the concept of cultural distance and its accompanying measure provides the opportunity to take stock of what makes for a good construct we organize our discussion around the issues of concept algorithm and data to clarify and gauge their contribution before highlighting the impact of their work more generally many of the challenges raised by critical observers focus on one of these three dimensions as there is value in looking systematically at the construct from concept to data we set out the argument of the index and discuss the validity of selected lines of criticism we identify a number of emergent and future directions for the conceptualization and measurement of cultural distance to facilitate the continuing advancement of work on international business

an overview of hofstede inspired country level culture research in international business since 2006 kirkman lowe gibson s 2006 jibs article summarized and critiqued international business research inspired by the most cited book in the field hofstede s 1980 culture s consequences international differences in work related values hofstede 1980 2001 they identified a number of issues in this research and offered several recommendations for improving it in the future thus laying a strong foundation for hofstede related work since 2006 in this commentary we assess kirkman et al s 2006 impact on the field our review shows that their ideas have informed and inspired their own and other scholars work and have led to significant progress in the way in which hofstede s framework has been used in international business in the last decade here we specifically focus on the country level culture studies and assess how research has implemented kirkman et al s three main recommendations to explore cultural dimensions beyond those introduced by hofstede to distinguish between country effects and cultural effects and to show not only if culture matters but also how much it matters in addition to the overview we provide a comprehensive test of these recommendations showing how they can be put into research practice underscoring the theoretical and empirical relevance of the original 2006 article our commentary concludes with additional ideas on further strengthening hofstede inspired research at the country level of analysis

regions of europe a feasible status to be discussed regions of europe jacques dreze a new concept is proposed that of regions of europe which do not have full statehood and belong not to any state but to the community directly without endorsing this possibility and limiting itself to its economic aspects this article discusses the various dimensions of its economic desirability it appears that in general autonomous regions will not find it advantageous to insure each other investigating how assets and liabilities should be apportioned at the time of secession it argues in favour of distributive neutrality net incomes are unchanged by the secession itself in both the seceding region and the rest of the nation how distributive neutrality could be implemented is explored through a number of suggestive examples in general a region receives a share of the public debt related to its share of the public primary deficit with corrections to account for growth unsustainability of the public debt and so on

designing economic instruments for the environment in a decentralized fiscal system designing economic instruments for the environment when external effects are important markets will be inefficient and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies however the standard economic analysis has tended to neglect important distinctions and interactions between the geographic scope of pollutants the enforcement authority of various levels of government and the fiscal responsibilities of the levels of government for example externalities generated in a particular local area may be confined to the local area or may spill over to other jurisdictions also local governments may be well informed about how best to regulate or enforce pollution control within their jurisdiction but they may not consider the effects of their actions on other jurisdictions finally the existence of locally generated waste emissions affects the appropriate assignment of both expenditure and tax responsibilities among levels of government the standard analysis therefore focuses mainly upon an aggregate or national perspective it typically ignores the possibility that the externality may be created and addressed by local governments and it does not consider the implications of decentralization for the design of economic instruments targeted at environmental problems this paper examines the implications of decentralization for the design of corrective policies that is how does one design economic instruments in a decentralized fiscal system in which externalities exist at the local level and in which subnational governments have the power to provide local public services as well as to choose tax instruments that can both finance these expenditures and correct the market failures of externalities

the implications of competition among jurisdictions does tiebout need politics the paper investigates whether compensation among local jurisdiction is by itself sufficient to ensure efficient provision of local public goods jurisdictions have fixed boundaries and each has an entrenched government with the power to tax and supply the public good residents can move costlessly among jurisdictions it is shown that competition among numerous jurisdictions is not sificient to guarantee public sector efficiency though residents can vote with their feet land is immobile hence governments can unsurp some land rents for their own ends increasing the number of jurisdictions limits but cannot completely eliminate the ability to exercise discretionary governmental power

a theory of interregional tax competition a general equilibrium model is constructed to study tax competition where local governments compete for capital by holding down property tax rates and public expenditure levels an exact definition of tax competition is provided and both the existence and nonexistence of tax competition are shown to be theoretically possible it is argued however that tax competition must occur under empirically reasonable conditions inefficiency in public production is also explicitly modeled the amount of capital used to produce a given level of public service output is shown to be greater than that which is required to minimize costs evaluated at the prices facing private firms

gravity and culture in foreign portfolio investment abstract using panel regression estimates from the imf s cpis survey of foreign debt and equity portfolios across 174 originating and 50 destination countries from 2001 to 2007 we clarify the role of culture and extend the set of cultural variables that have been investigated in gravity models of foreign portfolio investment fpi incorporating hofstede s cultural dimensions of individualism masculinity power distance and uncertainty avoidance we show how cultural traits in both originating and destination countries as well as the cultural distances that separate them interact with geographic distance and other gravity variables to determine global fpi patterns we find hitherto unreported effects and show that while gravity always deters fpi aspects of culture and cultural distance can offset this by supporting fpi

the past is prologue moving on from culture s consequences in this article we examine the theoretical and empirical understanding of culture within the international business discipline post the publication of kirkman lowe gibson 2006 in their paper kirkman et al 2006 provide a comprehensive retrospective on the impact of hofstede s seminal publication culture s consequences in addition to looking at what followed on from hofstede they laid out a research program they believed was necessary to move the study of culture forward unfortunately in their current review published in this issue they outlined how little if any of their thoughtful guidance was taken to heart in our perspective we believe that this signals that the study and use of culture in the international business field has become stuck in a theoretical and methodological rut and more radical thinking is necessary if we are going to advance beyond more of the same science that simply reiterates repeatedly that that culture matters without any coherent advancement of the key role that it plays in the international arena

types of bureaucratic interaction abstract a taxonomy of relationships between a public bureau and its sponsoring institution is modelled within a simple follower leader framework various assumptions are made with respect to who makes the decision about the bureaucratic activity level and with respect to cost information the role played by budgetary slack is emphasized deviations from the socially optimal bureau are identified but no general support is found for the view that bureaus tend to become too big

who wins from emissions trading evidence from california researchers and environmental policy advocates have raised questions regarding the distributional impacts of emissions trading programs a k a cap and trade while previous research has been careful to identify the causal effect of emissions trading on emissions reductions fowlie et al in am econ rev 102 2 965 993 2012 hereafter fhm we argue that existing estimates of differential impacts on demographic groups have relied on unrealistic assumptions regarding pollution dispersion in this paper we estimate the emissions reduction due to the reclaim cap and trade program in southern california following the identification strategy of fhm but we relax the assumption of uniform dispersion surrounding point sources we model the transport of effluents using a state of the science dispersion model to determine the areas impacted by emissions from each source importantly conditional on race and ethnicity we find that higher income areas receive larger reductions in pollution under cap and trade furthermore conditional on income or poverty rates we find that blacks benefit while hispanics lose relative to whites under reclaim

on the desirability of tax coordination when countries compete in taxes and infrastructure in our paper we demonstrate that when countries compete in taxes and infrastructure coordination through a uniform tax rate or a minimum rate does not necessarily create the welfare effects observed under pure tax competition the divergence is even worse when the competing jurisdictions differ in institutional quality if tax revenues are used to gauge the desirability of coordination our model demonstrates that imposing a uniform tax rate is pareto inferior to the non cooperative equilibrium when countries compete in taxes and infrastructure this result is completely reversed under pure tax competition if the countries are sufficiently similar in size if a minimum tax rate is set within the range of those resulting from the non cooperative equilibrium the low tax country will never be better off finally the paper demonstrates that the potential social welfare gains from tax harmonization crucially depend on the degree of heterogeneity among the competing countries

tax competition and income redistribution an empirical analysis for switzerland tax competition is supposed to lead to thecollapse of the welfare state because first it willbecome difficult for a single jurisdiction to levy aredistribution tax upon the rich and mobile andsecond such a policy if undertaken in onejurisdiction will attract poor individuals from otherjurisdictions and erode internal redistributionpolicies in this paper the impact of personal incometaxes and transfers on residence decisions oftaxpayers is analyzed with swiss subfederal data therelationship of tax competition and the erosion of theswiss welfare state is tested with aggregate data onincome redistribution

leviathan and competition among jurisdictions the case of benefit taxation abstract this paper shows that interjurisdictional competition for mobile factors of production forces the government to raise the efficiency of the public sector and thus helps to tame leviathan governments however this result is derived under some restrictive assumptions concerning the kind of tax policy used by the government in the case of benefit taxes e g user charges a leviathan may be tamed by interjurisdictional competition whereas this is not necessarily true in the case of lum sum taxes

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

welfare improving competition for mobile capital abstract this paper constructs a model in which regions provide firms with a public input financed by taxes that residents choose to levy on capital and wage income self interested government officials face incentives to provide the public input because its positive impact on labor and capital productivity leads to larger tax bases the positive relation between tax revenue and the public input is strengthened if capital is mobile across regions government officials engage in expenditure competition leaving residents better off than they would be in the absence of capital mobility to further enhance public sector incentives residents may choose to tax capital income at a positive rate although investment is discouraged

client profitability of diffusion segments across countries for multi generational innovations the influence of firm market and cross national differences there is scant research on the important managerial question of how to maximize returns on investments in either international business or international marketing literature we propose and test a conceptual framework using data from a large technology manufacturer service provider despite early adoption by innovators and early adopters the early majority segment is most profitable however the late majority segment and the early adopters segment are the next most profitable in the developed and emerging countries respectively we propose a decision support framework incorporating cross national distances on single generation and multi generation profitability for mnes offering multi generational products in multinational markets to be more profitable

nation states vs united empire effects of political competition on economic growth is political fragmentation i e nation states more favorable to economic growth than political unification i e a united empire this study develops an endogenous growth model to analyze the growth effects of fragmentation versus unification under unification the economy is vulnerable to excessive leviathan taxation and possibly subject to the costs of unifying heterogeneous populations under fragmentation the competing rulers are constrained in taxation but spend excessively on military defense if capital mobility is above below a threshold then fragmentation unification would favor growth and this threshold is increasing in the degree of defense competition and decreasing in the costs of heterogeneity

the tortuous evolution of the role of culture in ib research what we know what we don t know and where we are headed this paper takes stock of the literature on culture in international business by looking back in terms of evaluating what we know and what we do not know and looking forward by identifying emerging trends and outlining avenues for future research unresolved issues gaps and limitations include 1 narrow conceptualization of culture and fragmented approach to the study of culture 2 failure to adopt a multilevel approach and insufficient attention to level of analysis 3 insufficient attention to context and process 4 failure to adopt a more dynamic view of culture 5 tendency to equate country with culture and failure to explore other national differentiators and 6 western centric approach to the study of culture suggestions on redressing the unresolved issues include 1 broadening the definition of culture and transcending the values based approach to include schemas norms and memes 2 paying more attention to process context by exploring the situation dependent and dynamic nature of culture and 3 entertaining alternative research designs methods such as emic approaches qualitative methods experimental designs neuroscience based methods and replication studies while these may represent a major departure from methodologies popular in our field their use can hopefully help us overcome the fragmented discipline based approach which has contributed to the persistent problems that have plagued the study of culture in ib in the past

individualism and stock price crash risk employing a sample of 26 473 firms across 42 countries from 1990 to 2013 we find that firms located in countries with higher individualism have higher stock price crash risk furthermore individualism can be transmitted by foreign investors from overseas markets to influence local firms crash risk and can exacerbate the impact of firm risk taking and earnings management on crash risk moreover the positive relation between individualism and crash risk is amplified during the global financial crisis and attenuated by enhanced country level financial information transparency and the adoption of international financial reporting standards

the selection principle and market failure in systems competition abstract if governments stepped in where markets failed reintroducing markets through the backdoor of systems competition will again result in market failure three models are presented which illustrate this wisdom the first is concerned with congestion prone public goods and shows that fiscal competition may be ruinous for the governments the second considers the insurance function of redistributive taxation and shows that systems competition may suffer from adverse selection the third studies the role of quality regulation and shows that systems competition may be a competition of laxity resulting in inefficiently low quality standards

lost in translation the effect of cultural values on mergers around the world we find strong evidence that three key dimensions of national culture trust hierarchy and individualism affect merger volume and synergy gains the volume of cross border mergers is lower when countries are more culturally distant in addition greater cultural distance in trust and individualism leads to lower combined announcement returns these findings are robust to year and country level fixed effects time varying country pair and deal level variables as well as instrumental variables for cultural differences based on genetic and somatic differences the results are the first large scale evidence that cultural differences have substantial impacts on multiple aspects of cross border mergers

the distributional effects of pollution regulations do renters fully pay for cleaner air abstract changes in housing prices play an important role in determining the incidence of environmental regulations if the increase in value due to changes in environmental amenities is fully passed forward in the form of higher rental prices renters may receive no net benefit from the regulations to estimate the pass through of the value of an environmental amenity i exploit the reduction in suspended particulate matter pm 10 due to the 1990 clean air act amendments caaa using instrumental variables at varying levels of spatial aggregation i find that the 1990 caaa led to a significant increase in rents but the estimated percentage effect is about half as large as that of owner occupied housing values little of this difference is driven by income differences between renters and homeowners when stratifying by income and comparing the effect of the 1990 caaa on housing values and rents point estimates suggest that half of the increase in value is passed on to renters in the form of higher rents this suggests that pass through may be incomplete but landowners still capture much of the value of the air quality regulations

tipping and the dynamics of segregation schelling dynamic models of segregation journal of mathematical sociology 1 1971 143 186 showed that extreme segregation can arise from social interactions in white preferences once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a tipping point all the whites leave we use regression discontinuity methods and census tract data from 1970 through 2000 to test for discontinuities in the dynamics of neighborhood racial composition we find strong evidence that white population flows exhibit tipping like behavior in most cities with a distribution of tipping points ranging from 5 to 20 minority share tipping is prevalent both in the suburbs and near existing minority enclaves in contrast to white population flows there is little evidence of nonlinearities in rents or housing prices around the tipping point tipping points are higher in cities where whites have more tolerant racial attitudes

national culture and international business a path forward the anniversary of kogut and singh s construct of cultural distance is a good time to reflect on this immensely popular but flawed construct assess the efficacy of the remedies offered for its reform and refinement and chart an alternative approach that represents a departure from distance as the dominant paradigm with which to view and analyze the impact of national culture on cross border business the proposed alternative a contact based framework shifts attention from what sets cultures apart towards the actual cultural interface that firms and their executives experience when participating in an international transaction with this lens the cultural exchange is regarded as an evolving interactional process of engagement which commences prior to a transaction and proceeds through the life of the inter party arrangement and beyond and whose potential to yield negative or positive outcome is subject to specific contingencies implications for theory methodology and practice are delineated

tax competition and leviathan abstract attitudes towards downward pressure on tax rates from international tax competition depend on attitudes towards government this paper synthesises the two extremes which as in other areas of public finance have dominated the debate typically being presented as stark alternatives the view of government as a leviathan from which tax competition emerges as a useful constraint on policy makers and the view of government as a benevolent maximiser of their citizens welfare from which it emerges as a source of inefficiency conditions are derived under which when policy makers are neither entirely benevolent nor wholly self serving tax coordination benefits the representative citizen

interregional tax competition and intraregional political competition the optimal provision of public goods under representative democracy abstract this paper explores the implications of the interaction between inter regional tax competition and intra regional political competition for the optimal provision of public goods under representative democracy a la osborne and slivinski 1996 and besley and coate 1997 as an extension of hoyt s 1991 finding that intensified tax competition is always harmful and aggravates the extent to which public goods are undersupplied in a region we show that intensified tax competition can be beneficial if political as well as tax competition is considered in particular we identify plausible conditions under which i there is an optimal intensity of tax competition such that the interaction between interregional tax competition and intraregional political competition will result in the optimal provision of public goods and ii intensified tax competition will be beneficial if and only if the degree of tax competition is less than this optimal intensity

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

fiscal consequences of electoral institutions abstract there are more than 500 000 elected local government officials in the united states the most electorally dense county has more than 20 times the average number of elected officials per capita this paper offers the first systematic investigation of the link between electoral density and fiscal outcomes electoral density presents a tradeoff between accountability and monitoring costs increasing the number of specialized elected offices promotes issue unbundling reducing slack between citizen preferences and government policy but the costs of monitoring a larger number of officials may offset these benefits producing greater latitude for politicians to pursue their own goals at the expense of citizen interests we predict diminishing returns to electoral density and a documentclass aastex usepackage amsbsy usepackage amsfonts usepackage amssymb usepackage bm usepackage mathrsfs usepackage pifont usepackage stmaryrd usepackage textcomp usepackage portland xspace usepackage

public sector capital and the productivity puzzle a number of studies have suggested a quantitatively important relationship between public sector capital accumulation and private sector productivity with the most compelling evidence derived from analyses of state level data estimates herein of production functions that use standard techniques to control for unobserved state specific characteristics however reveal essentially no role for public sector capital in affecting private sector productivity only estimates of state production functions that do not include such controls find substantial productivity impacts this result reconciles existing econometric estimates with the findings of hulten and schwab based on growth accounting techniques as such techniques effectively control for state specific effects region level estimates are essentially identical to those from state data suggesting no quantitatively important spillover effects across states copyright 1994 by mit press

designing economic instruments for the environment in a decentralized fiscal system when external effects are important markets will be inefficient and economists have considered several broad classes of economic instruments to correct these inefficiencies however the standard economic analysis has tended to neglect important distinctions and interactions between the geographic scope of pollutants the enforcement authority of various levels of government and the fiscal responsibilities of the levels of government for example externalities generated in a particular local area may be confined to the local area or may spill over to other jurisdictions also local governments may be well informed about how best to regulate or enforce pollution control within their jurisdiction but they may not consider the effects of their actions on other jurisdictions finally the existence of locally generated waste emissions affects the appropriate assignment of both expenditure and tax responsibilities among levels of government the standard analysis therefore focuses mainly upon an aggregate or national perspective it typically ignores the possibility that the externality may be created and addressed by local governments and it does not consider the implications of decentralization for the design of economic instruments targeted at environmental problems this paper examines the implications of decentralization for the design of corrective policies that is how does one design economic instruments in a decentralized fiscal system in which externalities exist at the local level and in which subnational governments have the power to provide local public services as well as to choose tax instruments that can both finance these expenditures and correct the market failures of externalities

values schemas and norms in the culture behavior nexus a situated dynamics framework international business ib research has predominantly relied on value constructs to account for the influence of societal culture notably hofstede s cultural dimensions while parsimonious the value approach s assumptions about the consensus of values within nations and the generality and stability of cultural patterns of behavior are increasingly challenged we review two promising alternatives the constructivist approach centering on schemas and the intersubjectivist approach centering on norms and the evidence that demonstrates their usefulness in accounting for international differences in the behavior of managers employees and consumers we propose a situated dynamics framework specifying the role of values schemas and norms in accounting for cultural differences and delineating conditions under which each causal mechanism is operative values play a more important role in accounting for cultural differences in weak situations where fewer constraints are perceived schemas play a more important role when situational cues increase their accessibility and relevance and norms play a more important role when social evaluation is salient directions for future research based on this integrative framework and its implications for the measurement of culture and application in ib are discussed

how large are the welfare costs of tax competition abstract competition among regional governments may lead to suboptimal levels of capital taxation as governments ignore the external benefits of capital flight to other regions however there have been few attempts to quantify the magnitude of the resulting efficiency losses this paper presents extensive calculations of the efficiency costs over a wide range of parameter scenarios and assumptions about government behavior using various generalizations of wildasin journal of urban economics 25 1989 193 213 the efficiency costs tend to be fairly moderate under most though not all scenarios and particularly when allowance is made for the possibility of leviathan and non competitive government behavior

the productivity of schools and other local public goods producers abstract i construct an agency model of local public goods producers in which households make tiebout choices among jurisdictions in a world of imperfect information and costly residential mobility i examine producers effort and rent under local property tax finance and centralized finance i show that if there are a sufficient number of jurisdictions conventional local property tax finance can attain about as much productivity as a social planner with centralized finance can even if the social planner is armed with more information than a real social planner could plausibly have the key insight is that decentralized tiebout choices make some information the social planner would need verifiable and other information unnecessary

what do emissions markets deliver and to whom evidence from southern california s nox trading program a perceived advantage of cap and trade programs over more prescriptive environmental regulation is that enhanced compliance flexibility and cost effectiveness can make more stringent emissions reductions politically feasible however increased compliance flexibility can also result in an inequitable distribution of pollution we investigate these issues in the context of southern california s reclaim program we match facilities in reclaim with similar california facilities also located in non attainment areas our results indicate that emissions fell approximately 24 percent on average at reclaim facilities relative to our counterfactual furthermore we find that observed changes in emissions do not vary significantly with neighborhood demographic characteristics

the welfare effects of tax competition reconsidered politicians and political institutions the views on the welfare effects of tax competition differ widely some see the fiscal externalities as the cause for underprovision of public goods while others see tax competition as the means of reducing government inefficiencies using a comparative politics approach we show that tax competition among presidential congressional democracies is typically welfare improving while harmful among parliamentary democracies if under the latter public goods are sufficiently valued the results hold when politicians seek re election because of exogenous benefits of holding office by contrast when politicians hold office only to extract rents tax competition is harmful if politicians are sufficiently patient in the debate on tax competition two extreme views dominate both in the academic literature and in the policy arena in the canonical tax competition model benevolent governments set tax rates without taking into account the effect national tax policy has on other countries tax bases as a result a fiscal externality arises that makes competition harmful in the sense that tax rates are set too low and public goods are under

segregation and tiebout sorting the link between place based investments and neighborhood tipping abstract segregation has been a recurring social concern throughout human history while much progress has been made to our understanding of the mechanisms driving segregation work to date has ignored the role played by location specific amenities nonetheless policy remedies for reducing group inequity often involve place based investments in minority communities in this paper we introduce an exogenous location specific public good into a model of group segregation we characterize the equilibria of the model and derive the comparative statics of improvements to the local public goods we show that the dynamics of neighborhood tipping depend on the levels of public goods we also show that investments in low public good communities can actually increase segregation

do managers behave the way theory suggests a choice theoretic examination of foreign direct investment location decision making many empirical examinations of foreign direct investment location choice have relied on the use of secondary data and surveys on the choices made by firms about the form and location of overseas investment these studies have two inherent and related problems first they rely solely on the location choices made by different firms and assume that the domains of possible options considered were the same second there is an assumption about the rules used by firms to make these decisions yet the decisions are made by boundedly rational managers after reviewing the literature this study examines managers choices about foreign investment location through the use of structured experimentation the results show that in creating sets of investments to consider managers appear to follow fairly rational rules however the choice of actual investments appears less aligned to traditional models

fiscal centralization versus decentralization growth and welfare effects of spillovers leviathan taxation and capital mobility abstract this paper develops an endogenous growth model with spillovers of public goods leviathan taxation and mobile capital to examine the relative merits of centralized and decentralized fiscal systems for economic growth and social welfare we show that a decentralized system dominates a centralized system in terms of economic growth however the difference in social welfare between a decentralized and a centralized system is non monotonic and displays a hump shaped relationship with respect to capital mobility since higher capital mobility induces stronger tax competition this finding implies that there is an optimal degree of tax competition some tax competition is desirable but fierce tax competition may be harmful we also show that there is a critical level of spillovers of public goods above which centralization dominates decentralization in terms of social welfare as in previous studies however if spillovers are below this critical level capital mobility also matters in the welfare comparison between centralized and decentralized systems

an institutional approach to cross national distance cross national distance is a key concept in the field of management previous research has conceptualized and measured cross national differences mostly in terms of dyadic cultural distance and has used the euclidean approach to measuring it in contrast our goal is to disaggregate the construct of distance by proposing a set of multidimensional measures including economic financial political administrative cultural demographic knowledge and global connectedness as well as geographic distance we ground our analysis and choice of empirical dimensions on institutional theories of national business governance and innovation systems in order to overcome the methodological limitations of the euclidean approach we calculate dyadic distances using the mahalanobis method which is scale invariant and takes into consideration the variance covariance matrix we empirically analyze four different foreign expansion choices of us companies to illustrate the importance of disaggregating the distance construct and the usefulness of our distance calculations which we make freely available to managers and scholars

conceptualizing and measuring culture in international business and management from challenges to potential solutions understanding the influence of culture on business operations has been one of the most enduring components of international business ib and international management im theorizing and empirical investigation while several critiques and debates questioned the significant progress made in this domain the special issue we introduce here is meant to demonstrate that further advancement on how we conceptualize and measure culture is not only needed but also possible we provide an overview of past and current approaches in the measurement of culture in ib im and the challenges associated with these approaches and emphasize the important yet insufficiently acknowledged link between the theoretical conceptualization of culture and its measurement we then introduce the four articles included in the special issue and highlight how they break away from the addiction to approaches that have been very useful in getting where we are today but that might not always be useful in advancing knowledge beyond what we already know last but not the least we offer our own perspective on promising directions in conceptually and methodologically rethinking the study of culture in ib and im

negative practice value correlations in the globe data unexpected findings questionnaire limitations and research directions the study of culture and cultural values continues to be hotly debated among cross cultural researchers worldwide starting with the seminal work of kluckhohn and strodtbeck and hofstede and continuing with more recent efforts researchers have continued to develop and empirically examine cultural value frameworks in an attempt to understand how cultural differences affect work related behaviors and attitudes the purpose of this commentary is to briefly describe the interesting and counterintuitive findings from the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness globe project summarize the different interpretations of these findings offered by maseland and van hoorn and by brewer and venaik provide a critique of their arguments and finally offer a list of possible alternative interpretations and explanations for the conflicting findings in the globe study