piecewise linear tax functions progressivity and the principle of equal sacrifice abstract in this paper we discuss and criticise the conclusion asserted by mitra and ok mitra t ok e 1996 personal income taxation and the principle of equal sacrifice revisited international economic review 37 925 948 that when we restrict our attention to piecewise linear tax functions the principle of equal sacrifice implies progressivity

new blood as an elixir of youth effects of human capital tenure on the explorative capability of aging firms the relationship between firm age and innovation has been an enduring topic of interest we contribute to this research by studying how the effect of firm age on the quality of explorative and exploitative innovations is affected by the firm specific and industry tenure of the talent resources employees that the firm utilizes we start with the baseline predictions that firm age is related to the development of better exploitative innovations and worse explorative innovations however the tenure of employees intervenes in these relationships by way of bringing in new knowledge mental models and beliefs we predict that longer firm specific and industry tenure of employees enhances the positive effect of firm age on the quality of exploitative innovations while amplifying the negative effect of firm age on the quality of explorative innovations in addition for both the baseline and the moderating effect we also formulate a prediction comparing the quality of explorative innovations with those of

r d and firm size in the information and telecommunicatons industry of korea this study examines through empirical analysis whether the schumpeter hypothesis that the amount of r d activities by firms increases more than proportionately with firm size can be directly applied to the information and telecommunications industry of south korea the results of this study indicate that small and medium sized firms are more active than large sized firms in r d activities in the information and telecommunications industry

lone inventors as sources of breakthroughs myth or reality are lone inventors more or less likely to invent breakthroughs recent research has attempted to resolve this question by considering the variance of creative outcome distributions it has implicitly assumed a symmetric thickening or thinning of both tails i e that a greater probability of breakthroughs comes at the cost of a greater probability of failures in contrast we propose that collaboration can have opposite effects at the two extremes it reduces the probability of very poor outcomes because of more rigorous selection processes while simultaneously increasing the probability of extremely successful outcomes because of greater recombinant opportunity in creative search analysis of over half a million patented inventions supports these arguments individuals working alone especially those without affiliation to organizations are less likely to achieve breakthroughs and more likely to invent particularly poor outcomes quantile regressions demonstrate that the effect is more than an upward mean shift we find partial mediation of the effect of collaboration on extreme outcomes by the diversity of technical experience of team members and by the size of team members external collaboration networks supporting our meta argument for the importance of examining each tail of the distribution separately experience diversity helps trim poor outcomes significantly more than it helps create breakthroughs relative to the effect of external networks

on the principle of equal sacrifice in income taxation abstract in an influential article by young journal of economic theory 1988 44 321 335 it is shown that the traditional equal sacrifice principles in taxation can be justified from a non utilitarian perspective by proving that equal sacrifice is in fact a consequence of more primitive concepts of distributive justice this result is obtained in a distribution theoretic setting where total revenue to be raised is fixed the present paper studies the same question in a setting where the basic problem is to determine a tax function without any reference to the total tax revenue a setting which is familiar from the theory of progressive taxation and shows that i there exists a utility function which is continuous and strictly increasing relative to which all agents sacrifice equally if and only if the tax function is incentive preserving and ii any convex hence progressive and incentive preserving tax function equalizes sacrifice relative to a utility function which is continuous strictly increasing and concave

foreign investment and spillover efficiency in an underdeveloped economy evidence from the mexican manufacturing industry abstract in this paper we consider the question whether differences in technical efficiency of mexican plants in part derive from spillover efficiency associated with foreign direct investment we use labour productivity as a measure of technical efficiency and relate this to capital intensity labour quality and scale of production we measure the degree of competition by different concentration indices and the final factor determining efficiency is the presence of foreign subsidiaries if there is a positive relation between efficiency of domestic plants and the foreign participation of various industries we conclude that there is a spillover of technical efficiency the empirical evidence from the study indicates that this is the case

progressive taxation and the equal sacrifice principle abstract a classical problem in public finance is when does equal sacrifice imply progressive taxation suppose that a tax schedule imposes equal sacrifice on all taxpayers in loss of utility and that this property is preserved under re indexing of the schedule then the utility function must exhibit constant relative risk aversion i e it must be logarithmic or a power function if equal sacrifice relative to such a utility function holds for all taxable incomes and if tax rates do not exceed 100 percent then the degree of relative risk aversion must be at least unity and the tax must be nonregressive

industrial districts old wine in new bottles harrison b 1992 industrial districts old wine in new bottles reg studies 26 469 483 according to the theory of industrial districts a new wave of economic growth is being led in a number of regions in europe north america and east asia by spatially concentrated networks of mostly small and medium sized enterprises often using flexible production technology and characterized by extensive local interfirm linkages does this amount to a re emergence of the dominance of what urban and regional economists call agglomeration economies over the well known pressures on business to spatially disperse its operations neoclassical economic theorizing from marshall to perroux provides one perspective on the contemporary industrial district phenomenon another is afforded by granovetter s more recent elaboration of the ideas of embedding under and over socialization confronting each of these theoretical approaches with the other leads me to conclude that the industrial district prototypes involv

the internationalization of small and medium sized firms this paper contributes to the existing research by integrating the notions of organizational learning and entrepreneurial orientation into the body of international entrepreneurship our primary framework combines learning theory and the new venture theory of internationalization to study the extent to which small and medium sized companies engage in international activities we found that the firms international learning effort and entrepreneurial orientation are positively associated with internationalization intent whereas domestic learning effort is negatively related with internationalization intent overall our results suggest 1 that intensive knowledge renewal and exploitation regarding foreign markets and the internationalization process itself may increase internationalization by affecting the perceptions of opportunities offered by further international expansion and 2 that firms with an entrepreneurial mindset may be more likely to develop a long term substantial presence in the international arena compared to firms that are more reactive or conservative

measuring innovative performance is there an advantage in using multiple indicators abstract the innovative performance of companies has been studied quite extensively and for a long period of time however the results of many studies have not yet led to a generally accepted indicator of innovative performance or a common set of indicators so far the variety in terms of constructs measurements samples industries and countries has been substantial this paper studies the innovative performance of a large international sample of nearly 1200 companies in four high tech industries using a variety of indicators these indicators range from r d inputs patent counts and patent citations to new product announcements the study establishes that a composite construct based on these four indicators clearly catches a latent variable innovative performance however our findings also suggest that the statistical overlap between these indicators is that strong that future research might also consider using any of these indicators to measure the innovative performance of companies in high tech industries

establishing property rights establishing secure property rights in transition economies amounts to solving two problems inefficiency structures of control rights over assets and poor contract enforcement politicians and bureaucrats still wield excessive control over assets which results in inefficient underinvestment by entrepreneurs corruption is one way of getting around political control but the drawbacks are considerable particularly the limited enforceability of corruption contracts more workable strategies for establishing property rights in transition economies are giving equity to the bureaucrats and other parties that have control reforming the civil service and removing bureaucratic control rights through privatization russia s experience shows how privatization combined with equity incentives for enterprise insiders transfers control rights from the bureaucrats and stimulates political and economic pressures to protect private property rights

the equal absolute sacrifice principle revisited abstract we summarize the literature on equal absolute sacrifice income taxes and make some extensions we adapt the utilitarian equal sacrifice criterion to a wide class of rank dependent social welfare functions and find that liabilities depend on both income and position in the distribution we investigate whether such taxes need be progressive using a combination of analytics and simulation and in the process uncover tax functions not previously recognized as equating sacrifices finally out of horizontal equity considerations a new concept of the equal treatment of equals by an income tax emerges with implications for future work whose significance is discussed

resource dependency and institutional theory perspectives on direct and indirect export choices this article develops and tests resource dependency and institutional theory arguments to explain two choices facing sme owner managers 1 the decision whether to export or not and 2 if the firm exports the choice between a direct to customers abroad and an indirect using another firm as intermediary export mode binomial logistic regressions on our sample of 871 dutch smes suggest that institutional theory perspectives owner managers perception of the increased international presence of their domestic competitors customers and suppliers and perceptions of increased use of foreign suppliers explain the decision to export while resource dependency theory arguments owner managers perception of the favorability of access to knowledge and technology of production costs and of access to capital in the home market guide the choice between direct and indirect export modes

the ineffectiveness of entrepreneurship policy is policy formulation to blame entrepreneurship policy has been criticised for its lack of effectiveness some scholars such as scott shane in this journal have argued that it is bad public policy but this simply begs the question why the legislative process should generate bad policy to answer this question this study examines the uk s enterprise policy process in the 2009 2010 period it suggests that a key factor for the ineffectiveness of policy is how it is formulated this stage in the policy process is seldom visible to those outside of government departments and has been largely ignored by prior research the application of institutional theory provides a detailed theoretical understanding of the actors and the process by which enterprise policy is formulated we find that by opening up the black box of enterprise policy formulation the process is dominated by powerful actors who govern the process with their interests

what explains the trend reversal in the size distribution of korean manufacturing establishments abstract although korea is known for a size distribution of manufacturing firms and establishments increasingly skewed toward large size this paper shows that there has been a significant reversal in that trend since the mid 1970s various explanations of the original trend and its reversal including technology government policy and transaction costs are examined with pooled cross section and time series data for manufacturing establishments between 1963 and 1988 the results show that two general types of factors stand out in explaining both the original trend and its subsequent reversal namely the changing characteristics of both domestic financial markets and international marketing

the labour market effects of offshoring of small and medium sized firms micro level evidence for germany small and medium sized enterprises smes are the economic powerhouse of many oecd countries perhaps most prominently so in germany yet the labour market dynamics caused by the internationaliza

foreign investment and productive efficiency the case of mexico this paper examines whether the relative performance of firms within mexican manufacturing industries varies systematically with the presence of foreign subsidiaries it also analyzes how foreign entry influences the technological structure in host country industries the findings suggest that 1 foreign presence in an industry is positively correlated with structural efficiency and 2 foreign entry is related to structural changes only in the modern part of the industries the most important source of spillover efficiency is found to be in the competitive pressure induced by the foreign firms i introduction a widely held view among economists studying foreign investment is that one of the important contributions to the host country is likely to stem from external effects or spillovers the spillovers can be of different kinds the foreign firms may influence the productivity and growth of the domestically owned firm they may change the nature and evolution of concentration they may alter financing marketing and technological and managerial practices in the industries that they enter et cetera because of great methodological difficulties in investigating these effects empirically in addition to lack of data few empirical investigations appear in the literature three available econometric studies deal with the influence of foreign investment on the technical efficiency of host country firms one focuses on australia caves 1974 one on canada globerman 1979 and one on mexico blomstrom and persson 1983 all three find some support for the spillover benefit hypothesis but none of the studies analyzes the nature of spillover efficiency in depth the present paper is an attempt to identify through what mechanisms the spillover efficiency of foreign investment takes place by analyzing the effects of foreign investment on the productive efficiency of the industrial structure in mexico we will examine whether the relative performance of firms within an industry varies systematically with the presence of foreign subsidiaries we will also analyze the impact of foreign investment on structural change that is how foreign entry influences the technological structure in host country industries

causes of increased competition in the u s economy 1939 1980 examines the sources of increased competition in the united states u s between 1939 to 1980 in this paper authors consider the review of related literature trends and patterns of competitive structure in the u s economy influence of antirust actions on competition

the role of the business model in capturing value from innovation evidence from xerox corporation s technology spin off companies this paper explores the role of the business model in capturing value from early stage technology a successful business model creates a heuristic logic that connects technical potential with the realization of economic value the business model unlocks latent value from a technology but its logic constrains the subsequent search for new alternative models for other technologies later on an implicit cognitive dimension overlooked in most discourse on the topic we explore the intellectual roots of the concept offer a working definition and show how the xerox corporation arose by employing an effective business model to commercialize a technology rejected by other leading companies of the day we then show the long shadow that this model cast upon xerox s later management of selected spin off companies from xerox parc xerox evaluated the technical potential of these spin offs through its own business model while those spin offs that became successful did so through evolving business models that came to differ substantially from that of xerox the search and learning for an effective business model in failed ventures by contrast were quite limited

personal income taxation and the principle of equal sacrifice revisited this paper shows that in the domain of piecewise linear statutory income tax functions the principle of equal sacrifice implies tax progressivity the progressivity implication of the doctrine is in fact stronger the equal sacrifice principle in essence characterizes marginal rate progressivity a result which is in sharp contrast with the standard literature on public finance the authors also apply their findings to the personal statutory income taxation practices of the oecd countries and observe that the united states and turkey were the only ones violating the principle of equal sacrifice in the time period 1988 to 1991 copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

industrial restructuring and economic growth the last two decades have been a period of structural change in industrialised countries the extent of this restructuring process has been different across countries and industries though in this paper we investigate the effect of lagging behind in the process of downsizing and deconcentration we find empirical evidence of industries that experienced only little downsizing when compared internationally to experience less subsequent growth on average however this effect is industry dependent and its magnitude depends upon whether firm or establishment data are used technologically advanced industries are found to be particularly sensitive to lack of restructuring

from ability to pay to concepts of equal sacrifice abstract the ability to pay approach to taxation in mill s tradition is given a rigorous treatment in a social choice theoretic framework generalized concepts of equal sacrifice are axiomatized making explicit use of the ability to pay principle extensive statements on progressivity are derived however there is no such axiomatized concept that implies non excessive progressitivity irrespective of taxpayers utility function

extending the theory of the multinational enterprise internalization and strategic management perspectives this paper assesses the continued relevance of buckley and casson s 1976 book on the future of the multinational enterprise mne against a background of increasing criticism of transaction cost related scholarly work we demonstrate that the schism that can currently be observed in the field between international business and international management is misguided as the transaction cost internalization school may offer useful insights to both management scholars and managers for this to occur however it is necessary first to extend the empirical scope of transaction cost based reasoning to include the functioning of differentiated network mnes the paper suggests that buckley and casson s book still represents a beacon of clarity and a superb starting point for the study of the mne even if the complexity of this governance structure has grown far beyond what any international business scholar or even international management scholar could have predicted 25 years ago

distributive justice in taxation abstract a classical criterion for apportioning taxes is that all should sacrifice equally in loss of utility suppose that a method of apportioning taxes is continuous and has the following four properties i the way that taxpayers split a given tax total depends only on their own taxable incomes ii an increase in the tax total implies that everyone pays more iii every incremental increase in tax is apportioned according to taxpayers current after tax incomes iv the ordering of taxpayers by pre tax income and after tax income is the same then there exists a utility function relative to which all sacrifice equally

location specificity and the transferability of downstream assets to foreign subsidiaries we investigate the effect of firm specific advantages being local in scope and the influence of subsequent location specific disadvantages on the choice of foreign entry mode and subsidiary performance to look into this issue we examine japanese fdi data from the wholesale and retail industries two sectors that have productive activity concentrated in downstream processes and location bound resources our theoretical and empirical analyses demonstrate that in situations where required capabilities must be developed through local experience and where location specific resources were subject to market failure acquisition and joint venture strategies were preferred greenfield entries were successful in industries that permitted the offsetting of location specific disadvantages with firm specific advantages from our results we draw implications for the entry mode literature and offer a perspective on the performance of the entry mode choice

technological capabilities of countries firm rivalry and foreign direct investment studies on foreign direct investment fdi have concentrated on sectoral effects but rarely on country patterns in this paper we use u s department of commerce data to identify the largest country shares of new fdi entries into the u s and the technological motivations for their investments based on the technological intensities of major investing countries in manufacturing industries we conclude that technological industries attract a disproportionate share of fdi entries however the acquisition of u s technology is not a major motivation the findings indicate that industry rivalry is an important dimension to understanding fdi

mutual productivity spillovers between foreign and local firms in china the existing literature treats advanced technology sourcing as the only cause of reverse productivity spillovers from local to foreign firms and implies that mutual spillovers between foreign and local firms can only happen in the developed world this paper argues that the diffusion of indigenous technology and local knowledge helps the productivity enhancement of multinationals so that there can be mutual spillovers even in a developing country the results from a large sample firm level econometric analysis and a comparative case study of seven companies in chinese manufacturing support this new argument as mutual spillovers are identified between local chinese firms and overseas chinese or oecd invested firms

a good riddance spin offs and the technological performance of parent firms how do spin offs new ventures created by former employees of an incumbent firm affect the technological performance of their parents conventional wisdom holds that spin offs hurt parent firms the parent loses key staff routines are disrupted and performance declines although having some basis in fact we think the negative effects are overstated we argue that spin offs can enable parent firms to realign with their environment thereby avoiding the oncoming obsolescence arising from the combination of organizational inertia and environmental drift using data from the hard disk drive industry we find evidence that although the main effect of having a spin off on a parent firm s technological performance is positive the overall impact of a spin off depends upon the technological sophistication of the spin off and the time since the spin off occurred indeed parent firms of technologically sophisticated successful spin offs initially suffer poorer technological performance but over time they outperform firms that had no spin offs both effects are amplified to the extent that the spin off is more successful which we attribute to both increased environmental realignment and the positive signal that successful spin offs transmit to the broader labor market about the parent organization s reputation as an incubator of entrepreneurs and a desirable place to work

recruiting for ideas how firms exploit the prior inventions of new hires when firms recruit inventors they acquire not only the use of their skills but also enhanced access to their stock of ideas but do hiring firms actually increase their use of new recruits prior inventions our estimates suggest they do quite significantly in fact by approximately 219 on average however this does not necessarily reflect widespread learning by hiring in fact we estimate that a recruit s exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect with much of the diffusion to others being limited to the recruit s immediate collaborative network furthermore although one might expect the recruit s role to diminish rapidly as her tacit knowledge diffuses across her new firm our estimates indicate that her importance is surprisingly persistent over time we base these findings on an empirical strategy that exploits the variation over time in hiring firms citations to the recruits premove patents specifically we employ a difference in differences approach to compare premove versus postmove citation rates for the recruits prior patents and corresponding matched pair control patents our methodology has three benefits compared to previous studies that also examine the link between labor mobility and knowledge flow 1 it does not suffer from the upward bias inherent in the conventional cross sectional comparison 2 it generates results that are robust to a more stringently matched control sample and 3 it enables a temporal examination of knowledge flow patterns this paper was accepted by kamalini ramdas entrepreneurship and innovation

the promise of positive optimal taxation normative diversity and a role for equal sacrifice abstract a prominent assumption in modern optimal tax research is that the objective of taxation is utilitarian i present new survey evidence that most people reject this assumption s implications for several prominent features of tax policy instead preferring tax policies based at least in part on a classic alternative objective the principle of equal sacrifice i generalize the standard model to accommodate this preference for a mixed objective proposing a method by which to make disparate criteria commensurable while respecting pareto efficiency then i show that optimal policy in this generalized model calibrated to the survey evidence and u s microdata is capable of quantitatively matching several features of existing tax policy that are incompatible in the conventional model but widely endorsed in the survey and reality including the coexistence of substantial redistribution and limited tagging together these findings demonstrate the potential of a positive theory of optimal taxation

a technique for obtaining improved proxy estimates of minimum optimal scale in the field of industrial organization the concept of economies of scale is of fundamental importance large minimum optimum scale mos 1 and significant unit cost reduction up to mos size together suggest the possibility of high industry concentration and significant barriers to entry 2 however a recent paper in this review caves shirazi and porter 1975 has pointed to the severe difficulties encountered by students of industrial organization in empirical analyses of these relationships the chief problem is that objective measures of mos i e engineering estimates 3 and of the cost disadvantage of suboptimal scale production are available for only a small minority of all u s manufacturing industries at say the 4 digit level since there are more than 400 such industries it is most unlikely that there ever will be much change in this situation this means that in large scale cross section statistical analyses various proxies for scale economy influences must be used this is also the case in other fields of economics in which the influence of industrial organization has been recently felt in the investigation of sectoral patterns of direct foreign investment and the commodity composition of international trade for example unfortunately little has been achieved in terms of the development of reliable proxies for scale economies or minimum optimal scale this relative poverty in the data seriously jeopardizes the empirical analyses undertaken in all the above mentioned fields the present paper is a first step at overcoming this deficiency it offers a critical analysis of the proxies currently in vogue and it suggests an alternative technique for generating estimates of mos that appear to be substantially superior to them

novice serial and portfolio entrepreneur behaviour and contributions policy makers and practitioners are considering whether to allocate resources towards portfolio and serial entrepreneurs as well as the provision of additional initiatives to increase the pool of novice entrepreneurs to inform this policy debate univariate statistical tests were used to test for differences between 354 firms owned by novice serial and portfolio entrepreneurs in scotland also univariate tests were conducted to compare responses made by pairwise groups of entrepreneurs no significant differences were detected between the three types of entrepreneurs with regard to several entrepreneur and firm demographic characteristics additional analysis revealed that portfolio entrepreneurs have more diverse experiences and more resources than serial or novice entrepreneurs on average portfolio entrepreneurs appear to offer more attractive growth prospects than other entrepreneurs

redistributive effects of minimal equal sacrifice taxation we examine the circumstances under which minimal equal sacrifice taxation reduces income inequality focusing on absolute sacrifice and relative inequality we show that after tax incomes are more equally distributed than before tax incomes and that after tax inequality decreases with the revenue to be raised if and only if the elasticity of the marginal utility of income is decreasing however other things equal after tax inequality is shown to decline as the utility function becomes more concave we investigate next how these conclusions extend when one takes the absolute inequality view and considers that it is the relative loss in utility that has to be equalized across individuals

rent seeking protectionism and innovation in the american steel industry trade protection in a declining industry can cause damages beyond those revealed in the usual trade diagram analysis using data on the us steel firms we show that trade protection in that industry rewards poor performance reduces incentives to innovate and frustrates the normal schumpeterian process of creative destruction free trade gives consumers the lowest prices nonetheless protectionism in various guises is pervasive this we show is probably due to political rentseeking by groups that expect to lose as trade patterns adjust to innovation and altered economic conditions these groups invest in political lobbying to secure future returns in trade protection we find empirical evidence that trade protection returns private benefits to the shareholders senior workers and ceo s of lobbying firms perhaps more disturbingly trade protection also appears to reward less innovative firms and may thus frustrate the schumpeterian development of an industry we examine us steelmakers among the most active lobbyers in recent decades steel firms that lobby congress for protection tend to be larger older less diversified and less profitable than non lobbyers they pay their workers and ceos more and their ceos have longer tenure and are more likely to have risen through the ranks of their companies this suggests the owners managers and workers of less dynamic steel firms stand to lose from free trade the announcement of protection raises the stock prices of us steelmakers but by much more for lobbyers than non lobbyers when comprehensive and enduring protection was finally announced lobbyers more than non lobbyers cut jobs while maintaining or possibly increasing wages once comprehensive protection is in place protection also leads to large pay increases for lobbyers ceos this seems consistent with rent seeking and inconsistent with protection helping lobbyers mitigate social consequences of downsizing like unemployment our most striking finding is that high past r d spending is negatively correlated with stock price changes when proteption is announced and positively correlated with subsequent exit from the industry this seems inconsistent with protection providing a hiatus for retooling rather it suggests

small firm entry in us manufacturing a cross section empirical analysis examining the entry behavior of small firms is provided in this paper while the authors find that certain traditional market structure characteristics and entry barriers have a strong impact on small firm entry behavior the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms also explains a significant amount of the variation in the pattern of entry by small firms they conclude that small firm entry is at least partially determined by entry barriers industry specific characteristics facilitating retaliatory conduct by incumbent firms and the reliance upon innovative strategy by small firms copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

a dynamic decision model of smes fdi many scholars generally believe that small and medium sized enterprises smes in comparison to large firms are at a disadvantage in foreign direct investment fdi however new evidence suggests that smes also play an important role in fdi why do they undertake risk in other countries we are interested in what factors significantly motivate them to go abroad taiwan s smes play a vital role in her economic development and outward fdi and this study therefore focuses on the outward fdi of taiwan s smes we apply the hazard rate approach to perform an empirical analysis taking into consideration the conditional probability of the element of time among smes the lower the degree of capital intensities the larger the firm sizes the higher the export ratios or the larger the level of r d intensities are the greater the intention will be to undergo fdi the major factors motivating taiwanese smes to conduct fdi in recent years are utilizing local labor expanding markets and following major clients

the effect of own firm and other firm experience on foreign direct investment survival in the united states 1987 92 we argue that foreign firms operating in a host country generate information spillovers that have potential value for later foreign direct investment we test two predictions first we expect foreign direct investments by firms with experience in a host country to be more likely to survive than investments made by first time entrants second foreign direct investments will be more likely to survive the greater the foreign presence in the target industry at the time of investment subject to two contingencies the first contingency is that the relationship will be weak or nonexistent among firms with no experience in the host country because these firms have difficulty evaluating and taking advantage of the information spillovers the second contingency is that the presence of other foreign firms will not affect investment survival among firms that already have a presence in the target industry and undertake expansion these firms already possess general information about the target industries and are unlikely to gain additional benefit from information spillovers we find supportive evidence based on the survival to 1992 among 354 u s investments undertaken by foreign firms in manufacturing industries during 1987 1997 by john wiley sons ltd strat management j vol 18 811 824 1997 no of figures 1 no of tables 3 no of references 35

the internationalization of small and medium sized enterprises a policy perspective small and medium sized firms play an impor tant role in the process of creative destruction the focus of the paper is on the international diffusion of small and medium sized firms innovations small and medium sized firms face two challenges in globalization property rights protection and barriers to entry we suggest that these barriers can frequently be circumvented by using existing multinationals as interna tional conduits for small and medium size firms innovations however such intermediated modes of expansion is adversely affected by transaction difficulties and intermediator s rent extraction we raise two categories of questions i is the private sector systematically making the wrong choice between the direct and intermediated mode of international expansion and ii what should be the policy guidelines to improve the overall rate of international diffusion of innova tion by small and medium sized enterprises

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

mne sme cooperation an integrative framework although international business scholars have begun to recognize the division of entrepreneurial labor between mnes and smes there is a fragmented understanding of the different forms mne sme cooperation can take we develop a typology that takes into account not only complementarity of capabilities but also crucially the compatibility of intent between mnes exploration vs exploitation and smes international vs domestic orientation the framework offers a novel way to understand the forms and dynamics of mne sme cooperation we also show how it can be applied more broadly by considering its application to societal challenges such as achieving the united nations sustainable development goals

patent quality and research productivity measuring innovation with multiple indicators we analyse the determinants of the decline in research productivity using panel data on manufacturing firms in the us for the period 1980 93 we focus on three factors the level of demand the quality of patents and technological exhaustion we develop an index of patent quality using detailed patent information and show that using multiple indicators substantially reduces the measured variance in quality research productivity at the firm level is inversely related to patent quality and the level of demand as predicted by theory and patent quality is positively associated with the stock market value of firms

the rejuvenation of inventors through corporate spinouts this article focuses on corporate spinouts as a strategy that can rejuvenate the inventive efforts of inventors with a long tenure in the same company we rely on an unbalanced panel of 5 604 inventor year observations to study a matched sample of 431 inventors employed by the xerox corporation and find evidence in support of three predictions first inventors who join a spinout increase the extent of exploration in their inventive activities second they decrease the extent to which they rely on the parent organization s knowledge third because long tenured employees through socialization tend to progressively adopt more exploitative behavior than short tenured members they benefit relatively more from the spinout experience these results are robust to several econometric specifications that try to account for the endogeneity of the inventors decision to join the spinout for the fact that spinouts inventive activity may be intrinsically different from that of the parent company and for the possible presence of novel external stimuli for those who join spinouts the data provide large sample evidence consistent with the idea that socialization reduces opportunities for organizational learning we discuss the implications for theory and practice

the role of relative performance in inter firm mobility of inventors abstract prior research has emphasized the influence of inter firm mobility on knowledge flows and innovation yet we have an incomplete picture of the antecedents of inventor mobility building on theoretical traditions related to decision making based on limited asymmetric bounded information and economic and other incentives our paper suggests that after controlling for individual performance and other variables previously shown to affect inter organizational mobility an inventor s performance relative to his co patenting group alters his likelihood of mobility our analysis of 2648 inventors in the pharmaceutical industry shows that for those performing above their reference group of past and current co inventors in patenting an increase in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility and for those performing below the reference group a decrease in relative performance decreases the likelihood of mobility we also find that when inventors have more external scientific collaborations their likelihood of mobility increases and this variable moderates the relationship between the performance gap and mobility but only for those performing above their peers