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

conceptualizing and measuring cultures and their consequences a comparative review of globe s and hofstede s approaches this paper explains why globe used a set of cultural values and practices to measure national cultures we show why there is no theoretical or empirical basis for hofstede s criticism that globe measures of values are too abstract or for his contention that national and organizational cultures are phenomena of different order we also show why hofstede has a limited understanding of the relationship between national wealth and culture furthermore we explain why hofstede s reanalysis of the globe data is inappropriate and produces incomprehensible results we also show the validity of managerial samples in studying leadership finally we explain why hofstede s claim that globe instruments reflect researchers psycho logic reveals ignorance of psychometric methodologies designed to ensure scale reliability and construct validity

economic welfare evaluations for producers under uncertainty the validity of producer and consumer surplus measures of firm welfare under risk is examined under constant absolute risk aversion and output price uncertainty only these measures are an exact measure of firm welfare as defined by compensating variation equivalent variation or the change in the certainty equivalent under decreasing absolute risk aversion qualitative comparisons of various measures are discussed for example producer s surplus as measured by the area above the uncompensated risk averse supply curve overstates the compensating variation of a change in expected price of output procedures for calculating firm welfare under production uncertainty and a variety of economic environments are proposed generally these procedures are applicable only when absolute risk aversion is constant

the value of ideal contingency markets in agriculture an incomplete markets equilibrium in which no contingency markets are available is compared to a complete markets equilibrium formed by introducing a futures market and a crop insurance market the two regimes are compared using comparative static and welfare analyses numerical examples highlight important characteristics of the model and illustrate how the effects of introducing contingency markets can be quantified the main conclusions are that contingency markets in agriculture increase economic efficiency but there is no guarantee that farmers and consumers both benefit it is found that futures and crop insurance markets may reduce farmer welfare when the demand for farm products is price inelastic

the globe debate back to relevance this is a critical summary review of the debate about the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness globe study in jibs and other journals between november 2006 and the present issue several contributors did not realize that globe used three essential constructs taken from my publications in a sense entirely different from mine values practices and organizational culture not recognizing the ensuing confusion they had no answer for the question in my 2006 review what did globe really measure if you do not know what you are talking about you can continue arguing for ever beyond the fuzziness of what is measured the debate leaves us with an even more fundamental question what is the use of the globe dimensions

errors in the numerical assessment of the benefits of price stabilization this paper presents a simple computational procedure for determining a consumer s willingness to pay to have a price stabilization policy implemented numerical simulations are then provided which demonstrate that the commonly used expected surplus measures whether hicksian or marshallian can in fact seriously misstate the true benefits of price stabilization these simulations also illustrate the extent to which the results may be dependent upon the assumptions made implicitly or explicitly regarding the consumer s attitudes toward risk thereby underscoring the need to conduct sensitivity analyses to determine the robustness of cost benefit assessments with respect to these assumptions

multilevel innovation policy mix a closer look at state policies that augment the federal sbir program this paper examines nested multilevel innovation policies paying particular attention to u s federal and state small business innovation research programs with 45 states offering a range of sbir outreach and sbir match programs specifically designed to enhance the federal sbir program such programs provide a useful lens for examining the nature of the multilevel innovation policy mix the contributions of this article are twofold first the article provides theoretical motivation for multilevel innovation policy responses placing emphasis on positive policy responses in which state policies enhance federal policies second the article provides an empirical analysis examining the multilevel factors associated with a state government response that augments the federal sbir program the results from this analysis indicate these state policy actions are associated with a confluence of multilevel factors driven not only from top to down federal actions but also from bottom to up internal state political and economic factors as well as from lateral pressures from peer states

globe practices and values a case of diminishing marginal utility the globe study of national cultures identified nine dimensions of culture these nine dimensions were measured in the form of societal practices as things are and societal values as things should be the correlations between practices and values for societies surprisingly were found to be significantly negative for seven dimensions apparently people s values are contrary to their practices a note which appeared in a recent issue of this journal proposes that these anomalous correlations result from diminishing marginal utility the note argues that marginal utility theory applies to cultural dimensions and that the globe values measure societies marginal preferences for most of the dimensions rather than total preference weights through close analysis of the questionnaire items used by the globe team we show that this is not the case we demonstrate that the globe questions as asked do not elicit marginal preferences in fact they elicit values as claimed by globe but recognizing that values may well be shaped in part by existing practices we call for further study into the globe scores as it is likely that different explanations apply to practices values relationships across different dimensions

the theoretical structure of producer willingness to pay estimates this article analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of producer willingness to pay wtp for new inputs in addition to conceptualizing the producer wtp function we derive its comparative statics and show how these properties can be used to estimate quantities demanded or supplied and price elasticities we also discuss implications of the comparative statics

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

values and marginal preferences in international business in a recent paper in this journal maseland and van hoorn argued that values surveys tend to conflate values and marginal preferences this assertion has been challenged by brewer and venaik who claim that the wording of most survey items does not suggest that these elicit marginal preferences this commentary responds to their claim and restates our original argument we stress that the distinction between values and marginal preferences is a conceptual rather than a semantic issue conflation of the two is a problem of stated preferences methods in general regardless of question formats what is more we argue that support for the marginal preferences interpretation of values survey data does not come from the specific wording of questions used in surveys but from a growing number of paradoxical relations between values ratings and outcomes in values research implications are twofold first we argue that in order to measure values we need to look at alternatives to the stated preferences approach such as revealed preferences and experienced preferences of which the latter seems most promising second we find that values surveys eliciting marginal preferences are useful for understanding and predicting differences in behavior in a given context

willingness to pay measures and expectations an experiment in studies of the willingness to pay for various environmental commodities services it is typically explicitly or implicitly assumed that the respondent has perfect has perfect foresight this paper which is based on a questionnaire completed by examining if and how the value of a hunting permit is affected by the hunter s expectations regarding the outcome of the hunting in particular the willingness to pay is estimated as a function of expected values as well as variances of different variables using a question which reflects an extension of jensen s inequality to the multivariate case as well as measures of downside risk it is shown that risk attitudes are important determinants of the willingness to pay for a hunting permit

when elephants fight the grass gets trampled the globe and hofstede projects four aspects of the debate between hofstede and javidan et al are highlighted first it is shown that characterizing cultures either on the basis of aggregated self perceptions or on the basis of aggregated perceptions of others in one s society are not equivalent procedures each has inherent errors and neither can be considered as providing the one best way to denote national cultures furthermore the number of dimensions of national culture that can be usefully studied must be proportional to the limited number of nations available for comparative analyses third although hofstede and javidan et al appear to differ on optimal ways of aggregating individual level data to the nation level both appear to have done so in a way that does not prevent detection of differing relations between items at different levels of analysis finally we need greater clarity as to the ways in which national wealth relates to other aspects of culture it is a major component of contemporary national cultures and must be retained as an element within nation level analyses

alternative estimates of fed beef supply response to risk supply response models for fed beef incorporating risk by including both the mean and variance of output price are developed estimated and compared six different estimates of the mean and variance are obtained from futures prices arima processes and naive adaptive and rational expectations models empirical estimates are compared using nonnested testing procedures and indicate that the choice of the expectations model significantly influences elasticity estimates and whether supply response is positive or negative empirical evidence does not support any one model in particular suggesting that expectations are heterogenous rather than homogenous most agricultural production is characterized by a lag between the time input decisions are made and the time output actually reaches the market as a result supply response functions are based on the hypothesis that quantity produced depends on known input prices and producers expectations of output price expectations frequently have been modeled based solely on past prices examples include naive expectations adaptive expectations extensively reviewed by askari and cummings and autoregressive integrated moving average arima schemes gardner as well as others have used futures prices to estimate producers expected prices although chavas pope and kao found that futures prices are not good proxies for producers expectations

shifting foundations of agricultural policy analysis welfare economics when risk markets are incomplete the neat alignment of resources output and prices specified by the perfect competition model is far from duplicated in free markets and the equally neat alignment assumed under the constraints of a program is not experienced when programs are in effect in particular areas under empirically determined supply curves are unlikely to represent opportunity costs the basic theory is invaluable in providing a conceptual orientation for the analysis of programs but the assumptions implicit in the literal use of simple forms of it for policy conclusions are breathtakingly heroic

toward a theory of the political entrepreneur evidence from local government political scientists have been increasingly interested in entrepreneurs individuals who change the direction and flow of politics in this research note we synthesize aspects of an economic approach to entrepreneurship with concepts used in political science we then tie these theoretical observations to the emergence of entrepreneurs in local governments and test components of our theory using observations from a large set of suburban municipal governments empirically we identify several conditions that affect the probability that an entrepreneur will emerge in a local government especially slack budgetary resources that the political entrepreneur can reallocate we also find that the probability with which an entrepreneur is found in local government is a function of the difficulty of overcoming collective action problems in a community

the value of a rational expectations forecast in a risky market a theoretical and empirical approach the central focus of this paper is to develop an easily computable money metric of an agent s willingness to pay for information under risk to extend this concept to the market and to demonstrate its application in a simple twoequation econometric model of the u s fed cattle market the paper draws on previous contributions to the theory of competitive firm under price uncertainty namely rothschild and stiglitz sandmo and more recently pope 1978 1980 and pope chavas and just the latter contributions provide insight into the econometric application of the theory and into the validity of producer surplus measures of firm welfare under risk the conceptual approach presented in this paper facilitates empirical application for a restricted class of utility functions it is shown that the money metric of an agent s willingness to pay for additional information can be computed from the firm s risk averse supply or factor demand function while other studies e g hayami and peterson freebairn decanio have derived welfare estimates of the value of a fore

the economics of sequential choice applied to quasi option value abstract this paper develops a general model that can be used to determine the value of sequential forecasts the model is used 1 to examine the interacting effects of strategies for coping with environmental uncertainty and 2 to explore the relationship between the theories of sequential choice and quasi option value the framework presented bridges these two schools of thought and provides a tool for evaluating one time e g climate change or repetitive e g pollution forecasts of environmental damage

consumer s surplus without apology the purpose of this paper is to settle the controversy surrounding consumer s surplus and by so doing to validate its use as a tool of welfare economics i will show that observed consumer s surplus can be rigorously utilized to estimate the unobservable compensating and equivalent variations the correct theoretical measures of the welfare impact of changes in prices and income on an individual i derive precise upper and lower bounds on the percentage errors of approximating the compensating and equivalent variations with consumer s surplus these bounds can be explicitly calculated from observable demand data and it is clear that in most applications the error of approximation will be very small in fact the error will often be overshadowed by the errors involved in estimating the demand curve the results in no way depend upon arguments about the constancy of the marginal utility of income consequently this paper supplies specific empirical criteria which can replace the apologetic caveats frequently employed by those who presently apply consumer s surplus moreover the results imply that consumer s surplus is usually a very good approximation to the appropriate welfare measures to preview below i establish the validity of these rules of thumb for a

what did globe really measure researchers minds versus respondents minds the globe research program expanded the hofstede model of five dimensions of national cultures to 18 a re analysis based on globe s 2004 summary book produced five meta factors one was significantly correlated with gnp capita and from the hofstede dimensions primarily with power distance three more correlated significantly with hofstede s individualism uncertainty avoidance and long term orientation the fifth included the few globe questions that related to hofstede s dimension of masculinity versus femininity globe s respondents minds classified the questions in a way that the researchers minds did not account for and which closely resembles the original hofstede model

bank dependence in emerging countries cross border information percolation in mutual fund equity investing in contrast to the literature involving u s bank domestic lending we find that mutual funds affiliated with lending banks reduce their equity investment and turnover in the non u s listed stock of their non u s borrowers compared to non lending banks or unaffiliated mutual funds reduced equity holdings increase loan spreads preserving the lending bank s cross border information monopoly equity market holdings and turnover are reduced when banks lend to firms in emerging nations and when the geographic distance between the lender and the mutual fund manager is greatest thereby long range information percolation may benefit global institutions at the expense of individual subsidiaries

a producer s willingness to pay for information under price uncertainty theory and application the central focus of this paper is the development of an easily computable money metric of an agent s willingness to pay for information under risk empirical estimates of the value of information are important for obtaining insights into issues such as the informational efficiency of alternative market structures the effects of the quality of agent s conditional forecasts of market prices on the efficiency of resource use and the social profitability of information supplied by private enterprise and public agencies the paper draws on previous contributions to the theory of competitive firm under price uncertainty namely rothschild and stiglitz 8 sandmo 9 and more recently pope 5 6 and pope chavas and just 7 the latter contribution provides insight into the econometric application of the theory and into the validity of producer surplus measures of firm welfare under risk in these models the production decision is made given the producer s subjective distribution of output price the value of information in this context can be formulated using the bayesian approach which amounts to a comparison of expected utility levels from choices based on prior information with choices based on additional information contributions in this area are numerous and include those of lindley 4 winkler 10 and more recently gould 2 and hess 3 who focused on the effects of risk preferences and the nature of the distribution of random events on the value of information however the literature has given little attention to the question of deriving a money metric of an agent s willingness to pay for information under risk that can be applied to an econometric analysis of observed behavior in part the problem lies with the empirical application of bayes theorem to explain the observed behavior of risk averse agents while estimates of the agent s prior distribution of uncertain events may be obtained from observed choices or in some cases elicited directly the content of additional information the process by which additional information becomes available and whether the agent behaves

on the theory of the competitive firm under uncertainty when initial wealth is random since sandmo s seminal paper on the theory of the competitive firm under output price uncertainty there has been considerable research on this topic 2 5 6 10 11 14 in all these studies it is assumed that in the absence of complete contingent markets output price risk is the only source of uncertainty for the firm however this may not be a realistic assumption in particular as argued by kihlstrom et al 7 it appears reasonable to consider the case where some of the initial wealth of the firm is held in risky assets in that case initial wealth is uncertain and should be modelled as a random variable the objective of this paper is to investigate the introduction of random initial wealth in sandmo s theory of the firm under price uncertainty in sandmo s model a number of important comparative static results e g the conditions under which the supply function is upward sloping 14 69 or under which increased price uncertainty reduces supply 5 depends critically on the sign of a particular expression stated in lemma 2 in ishii 5 while sandmo 14 69 shows this expression is non negative under arrow pratt decreasing absolute risk aversion it can be verified that his proof no longer holds when initial wealth is random therefore the comparative static analysis conducted by sandmo 14 batra and ullah 2 and ishii 5 is no longer valid and gives ambiguous results under initial wealth uncertainty the reason is that the arrow pratt measures of risk aversion 1 12 are too weak for making comparisons in situations where there is more than one source of uncertainty 13 then what can be deduced from the theory of the competitive firm in the realistic case where both initial wealth and output price are uncertain we will show here that meaningful results on the behavior of the competitiv firm under uncertainty can be obtained provided that the arrow pratt measures of risk aversion 1 12 are replaced by the ross measures of risk aversion 13 in particular a comparative static analysis of the production decisions using ross characterization of risk behavior is presented a number of new results are derived on the properties of risk responsive supply and input demand functions under both price and initial wealth uncertainty

explaining the negative correlation between values and practices a note on the hofstede globe debate this note provides an explanation for the presumably counterintuitive negative correlations between values and practices reported by the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness project we argue that such results are compatible with basic microeconomic insights concerning diminishing marginal utility this explanation implies that values surveys as they are generally elicit marginal preferences rather than underlying values therefore they are a problematic instrument for the measurement of cultures and need to be improved so as to discriminate between the importance attached to an objective in general and that attached to it given current levels of satiation

leading cultural research in the future a matter of paradigms and taste the styles and approaches used in cross cultural organizational research are nearly as varied as the cultures under study we see two variations of one dominant style in the work of hofstede and the globe research consortium in this commentary i shall place these approaches in context and discuss alternatives that seem to be highly promising but largely overlooked based on this analysis i conclude that it may well be time that this form of large scale multi country survey be set aside for the development of alternative mid range theories having a more direct application and explanation for organizational phenomena in a cultural and national context

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

conceptualizing and measuring distance in international business research recurring questions and best practice guidelines distance is a central concept in international business research yet there is debate about the construct as well as its operationalization in this editorial we address three of the most important recurring questions posed by authors editors and reviewers by examining the theory methods and data of distance research we discuss 1 how to theorize on distance and 2 what method and 3 what data to use when constructing a distance index we develop practical recommendations grounded in theory illustrating and supporting them by calculating cross country distance indices for all available country pairs and two of the most used distance indices cultural and institutional we show that whereas a specific method to calculate distance may matter to some extent the choice for a specific cultural or institutional framework to measure cultural or institutional distance has a major impact on country pair distances overall this editorial highlights the importance of matching data and method to the theoretical argument

maxing out globally individualism investor attention and the cross section of expected stock returns we examine the role of cultural difference in the pricing of positive extreme returns max for 47 000 stocks from 42 countries from 1990 to 2012 we find that investors overpay for stocks with high max and that max premium the spread from long short strategy based on low and high max stocks is both statistically and economically significant worldwide the negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and expected returns or idiosyncratic volatility puzzle exists only for stocks with high max implying that the puzzle may arise from the overpayment for stocks with high max and the subsequent return reversal consistent with the expectation that overpayment will be stronger for overconfident investors the max premium is larger in countries with high individualism index idv than it is in countries with low idv furthermore we find the max premium to be larger and the difference in the max premium between high and low idv countries to be more pronounced when vix and volatility are high our fi

innovation procurement as capability building evaluating innovation policies in eight central and eastern european countries abstract after decades of impressive growth the new member states of the european union are once again in transition but this time from imitation to innovation driven competitiveness this paper evaluates the relationship between both public funding and public procurement for innovation ppi and firm level innovation output and outcome additionality in eight central and eastern european countries matching estimates on a sample of 41 623 firms suggest that ppi has a large effect on innovation and output and the highest additionality is sometimes achieved when firms receive both financial support and innovation oriented public procurement we argue that policy makers aiming to strengthen indigenous innovation capabilities should place stronger emphasis on ppi

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