political holes in the economy the business network of partisan firms in hungary this article redirects attention from the question of how business ties have an impact on politics to the question of how political ties have an impact on business specifically do divisions within the field of politics become divisions in the field of business networks to study co evolution of political and economic fields we conducted a historical network analysis of the relationship between firm to party ties and firm to firm ties in the hungarian economy we constructed a dataset of all senior managers and boards of directors of 1 696 corporations and the complete set of all political officeholders from 1987 to 2001 findings from our field interviews and dyadic logistic regression models demonstrate that director interlocks depend to a significant extent on political affiliations although the political and economic fields have been institutionally separated firms and parties have become organizationally entangled firms of either left or right political affiliation exhibit a preference for par

inequality in the globalizing asia this article investigates the impact of globalization on the inequality of asia it is the first attempt to examine 11 asian countries panel data allowing nonlinearity between globalization and inequality from 1960 to 2003 with robustness check we also survey the literature on growth globalization and inequality and reflect their endogenous relationships to our article we found the significant turning point of globalization at which inequality starts decreasing as further globalization proceeds it will offer us policy implications for the ongoing process of globalization in the asian economies

some macroeconomics for the 21st century this note describes a numerical simulation of a model of economic growth a simplified version of robert tamura s 1996 model of world income dynamics based on technology diffusion the model makes predictions for trends in average world income growth and about the evolution of the relative income distribution that accord well with observation the model is used to forecast the course of world income growth and income inequality over the century to come

chinese villages and townships as industrial corporations ownership governance and market discipline1 public firms in a reforming socialist economy face two problems the old soft budget constraint syndrome and new principal agent problems china s township village government owned enterprises tves outperform state owned enterprises soes in growth rate and productivity three explanations are proposed in the literature 1 tves represent informal or ambiguous private property rights which are most efficient in partial reform 2 the small size and scale of township village governments as industrial corporations allows officials to monitor tves directly and to limit their wherewithal for cross subsidizing 3 strict market disciplines facing tves render indirect market monitoring to mitigate agency problems effectively analyses of jiangyin data show that a while both superior to local soes village and township enterprises share similar productivity and b the scale of township village corporations slightly increases productivity i conclude that local state corporatism should be revised to inc

political connections and entrepreneurial investment evidence from china s transition economy abstract recent literature in entrepreneurship suggests that market and legal institutions matter for entrepreneurial investment yet prior studies have focused on the role of formal institutions building on new institutional theory and political connections literature this study aims to evaluate the role of political connections in entrepreneurial reinvestment in less developed and transition economies the purpose of this paper is threefold first it aims to demonstrate systematically how political connections affect entrepreneurial reinvestment second it applies this relationship to a subsample group i e small and medium enterprises smes in order to empirically test whether political connections are more beneficial for large firms or smes third it demonstrates that political connections substitute for rather than complement formal market and legal institutions the empirical test uses a nationally representative sample of entrepreneurial firms from china s transition economy

guanxi vs networking distinctive configurations of affect and cognition based trust in the networks of chinese vs american managers this research investigates hypotheses about differences between chinese and american managers in the configuration of trusting relationships within their professional networks consistent with hypotheses about chinese familial collectivism an egocentric network survey found that affect and cognition based trust were more intertwined for chinese than for american managers in addition the effect of economic exchange on affect based trust was more positive for chinese than for americans whereas the effect of friendship was more positive for americans than for chinese finally the extent to which a given relationship was highly embedded in ties to third parties increased cognition based trust for chinese but not for americans implications for cultural research and international business practices are discussed

threats and opportunities faced by private businesses in china abstract this article presents a comprehensive analysis of the environment experienced by private businesses in china through examining their relationships with the major stakeholders namely government supplier employee customer and competitor since the announcement of the economic reform in 1978 substantial political and economic power has been delegated from the central government to the regions endowed with this power local governments have crucial influence on the size of the private sector within their jurisdiction being outside the state allocation plan private firms have less access to raw materials and credit in the volatile political climate of china they are vulnerable to attack during political campaigns maintaining a cordial relationship with local cadres through paying bribes and various charges is thus a prerequisite for survival having solicited political backing a private entrepreneur can not only run his business more smoothly but also may be more tolerated in his illegal activities such as tax evasion profiteering and selling banned products in short the whole situation can be described as a collusion of local governments and private businesses at the expense of the central government s interest under the economic reform the distribution system has become less rigid than before it is easier for private firms to secure supplies whether raw materials or manufactured goods labor input is also not a problem for most private firms which are small in size and employ mainly unskilled workers however large private enterprises have to compete with state collective and foreign enterprises for managerial staff who are in short supply there have been marked changes in the consumption pattern since the early 1980s people spend less on staple foods and more on non staple foods consumer goods and services moreover china is experiencing a consumption boom altogether this offers great opportunities to the private sector which has been expanding its share of industrial output and retail sales very fast on the other hand competition is becoming much keener state enterprises are improving their efficiency and giant multinational corporations are rushing in as there are few entry barriers private entrepreneurs are also competing fiercely among themselves the ideological contradiction of having labor exploitation by private entrepreneurs in a socialist country has prevented the chinese government from actively encouraging private business the private sector has been assigned a supplementary role in the dominant public economy this status has led to discrimination against private firms in obtaining factor inputs accounting partly for their vulnerability to bureaucratic harassment by local cadres this will continue to hamper private business development it is concluded that ideological and political reforms in addition to the economic reform are required for providing a more conducive environment for private businesses the chinese experience of liberalizing the private sector offers useful insights to governments of other developing countries

committee assignments constituent preferences and campaign contributions committee assignments constituent preferences and campaign constributions the familiar economic model of regulation as developed by stigler 1971 peltzman 1976 and becker 1983 posits an essentially frictionless market process for regulatory policy formation in which a single regulator legislator chooses policy to maximize net support from competing groups in this paper we extend the supply side of this model by considering the effect of legislative institutions and unorganized constituent preferences on the ability of incumbents in the house of representatives to serve specific interest groups we then test this formulation by examining the recent history of interest group campaign contributions to these legislators our theoretical model concentrates on how a legislator allocates time between serving specific interest groups outside his district and serving his constituency we do not model interest group decisions directly assuming simply that they purchase their desired amount of service from the lowest cost suppliers our model sorts legislators by the supply price at which they can serve a particular group this price depends on the preferences of the voters in the legislators district and the productivity of the legislator in producing policy service for each group 1 the empirical section tests the model by examining the pattern of interest group campaign contributions to house incumbents from 1978 through 1984 our regression analysis tends to confirm both implications of the theory first the pattern of campaign contributions from specific interest groups to legislators is shaped by the division of substantive legislative and regulatory jurisdictions represented by the system of house standing committees second voter preferences influence the pattern of contributions by affecting the supply price at which a legislator can offer policy to interest groups legislators with sympathetic or indifferent constituencies are able to offer a lower price and are therefore able to attract larger sums than those with hostile constituencies these results are important for two reasons first the influence of congressional institutions such as committees on policy is not widely accepted while several studies faith levins and tollison 1982 weingast and moran 1983 weingast 1984 grier 1989 and robert 1990 have documented the effects of changes in a particular committee on policies under its jurisdiction this work considers the jurisdiction of only a single committee in each case 2 by examining the linkages between congressional committees and political action committees pacs we investigate whether interest groups act as if committees have power second while the chicago model of regulation emphasizes correctly in our view that policy is the result of vote maximizing calculations and the incremental balancing nature of any equilibrium the model is imprecise about which sets of preferences are most important in determining the levels of policy or the size of changes in policies focusing on committees promotes a parsimonious specification of both the political players members of the relevant committee rather than the entire congress and the pivotal voters committee members constituencies more than the nation determining specific policy outcomes the paper is organized as follows section i reviews some issues on the nature and sources of committee influence in the u s congress the second section incorporates committee assignments into a theory of decision making by interest group investors sections iii and iv describe our data and estimation technique and present the empirical results the fifth and final section discusses some implications and conclusions of this research i committee power in congress legislators differ substantively by virtue of their committee assignments committees in congress and particularly in the house of representatives possess disproportionate power over the policy areas in their respective jurisdictions have the right to hold hearings and recommend budget allocations for the bureaus in their jurisdiction goodwin 1970

institutional environment public private hybrid forms and entrepreneurial reinvestment in a transition economy abstract many less developed and especially transition economies have had high levels of entrepreneurial reinvestment for relatively long periods despite the absence of developed government institutions to resolve this puzzle this study proposes that many entrepreneurial firms in these economies have been actively engaged in political activities through which organizational arrangements are created to co opt government agencies into their organizational structures to manipulate and even control unfavorable institutional environments it empirically evaluates the role of one such organizational arrangement public private hybrid forms in china s gradual reform period it suggests that through protecting property rights and facilitating access to key resources and opportunities public private hybrid forms may act as a substitute for deficient market and legal institutions thus facilitating entrepreneurial reinvestment the findings from a national sample of chinese entrepreneurial firms support our propositions in general entrepreneurial firms adopting public private hybrid forms enjoy higher entrepreneurial reinvestment rates than pure private firms during gradual reform and this may be the case because such forms help to both protect private property rights and access key resources and opportunities in addition the association between the forms and reinvestment rate is found higher under less developed government institutions

regional institutional development political connections and entrepreneurial performance in china s transition economy while previous research emphasizes the role of political connections in facilitating entrepreneurial performance during china s early reform period 1978 1999 this study argues that regional institutions were increasingly conducive to entrepreneurial activities and thus also played a key role in china s entrepreneurial success during that period the purpose of this study is twofold first it aims to demonstrate how regional institutional development facilitated entrepreneurial performance in china second it aims to understand how formal institutional development among chinese regions affected the role of political connections using a two level hierarchical dataset on chinese private enterprises this study finds that not only legal protection of property rights but also the development of market systems mattered for entrepreneurial performance in addition it shows that political connections played a diminishing role during regional institutional development in china

legislative monopoly and the size of government if the economics profession had a fetish it would surely be competition unrestricted competition allows resources to flow to their most productive uses and maximizes the net welfare of society one of the few points virtually all modem economists would agree on is that with the possible exception of a few well defined special cases e g money production and public utilities they have never met an entry barrier they did not want to eliminate entry barriers facing potential competitors in markets reduce economic efficiency and generate social waste in a classic article tullock 2 extended this reasoning to the political process he makes the following argument lower entry barriers into politics e g lowered costs of entry into the legislature for potential entrants makes governmental decision making more competitive and tends to make p mc 2 competitive government will supply a higher level of public goods at lower tax prices taxes will therefore be lower holding other things equal in political jurisdictions which are more competitive while taxes will be higher in monopoly jurisdictions which will seek to exploit monopoly rents from taxpayers this reasoning makes the assumption that it is appropriate to model government as a kind of firm which provides public goods in exchange for tax revenues from taxpayer voters in such a setting increased competition would most likely produce increased efficiency in the provision of public goods and increase net social welfare buchanan 6 made a very different argument which while not directly intended to apply to the problem of the behavior of government may have direct bearing on those problems he was concerned with the social welfare effects of the monopolization of crime by organized criminal

the process of socialist economic transformation in this paper we consider the reform process in those central and east european countries that have made the decision to move from a more or a less planned socialist system to a private market economy one in which private ownership predominates and most resources are allocated through markets because the reform process is both complex and intertwined with political factors especially the shift towards representative democracy and because there are substantial differences among the reforming countries no single detailed road map can guide the way to the new systems rather the paper sets out general considerations that provide a framework for reform and relates the choices to some initial conditions of the various reforming countries the framework applies also to the soviet union or in the event of its disintegration to its successor states as they move to market systems

the industrial structure of the california assembly committee assignments economic interests and campaign contributions this paper examines the provision of campaign contributions made by economic interests to incumbents seeking reelection in the 1984 1986 and 1988 california assembly elections the study tests whether the distribution of campaign contributions by specific industrial sectors corresponds to legislator possession of the policy property rights associated with membership on relevant assembly standing committees a non parametric statistical model compares the distribution of campaign contributions from groups within a given industrial sector to members of relevant policy committees with the distribution of contributions from all other contributor classes the empirical analysis confirms that committee assignments significantly affect the allocation of special interest resources in assembly elections substantiating the importance of institutional considerations in influencing special interest activity

determinants of entrepreneurial activities in china abstract the institutional environment including protection of private properties and contract enforcement has been rather unfavorable for the emergence and development of china s private enterprises this is in sharp contrast to the case of the developed economies where the institutional environment is conductive to the entrepreneurial activities and only the personal attributes of would be entrepreneurs determine their entrepreneurship decision we thus propose a theoretical framework for the entrepreneurship decision in china with a focus on the role of the institutional environment using a life histories survey data of 2854 respondents from twenty cities in china we find strong support for the impacts of the institutional environment and its interactions with other determinants of entrepreneurship decision

property rights and finance which is the tighter constraint on private sector investment weak property rights or limited access to external finance from a survey of new firms in post communist countries we find that weak property rights discourage firms from reinvesting their profits even when bank loans are available where property rights are relatively strong firms reinvest their profits where they are relatively weak entrepreneurs do not want to invest from retained earnings

economic transformation population growth and the long run world income distribution abstract we present and calibrate a model where trade with advanced economies spurs development and trade opportunities depend on the relative population in advanced and developing countries as developing countries become advanced prospects improve for the remaining developing countries if population growth differentials between developing and advanced economies are small economic development accelerates over time otherwise long run global prosperity requires a sufficiently large initial population in advanced countries more open countries develop faster but more openness by all developing countries may only modestly increase their aggregate growth china s development may hurt developing countries in the short run but improves their long run prospects

friends with benefits how political connections help to sustain private enterprise growth in china by analysing data from a survey of 511 chinese private enterprises we find that their owners respond to government discrimination by developing political connections with government officials a one standard deviation increase in the insecurity of property rights has the effect of increasing the number of friends in the government by a substantial 22 these friends significantly help to mitigate by half the negative effect arising from the difficulties of obtaining land and excessive regulations on enterprise growth this explains why an institutional environment of weak property rights has not stopped private enterprises in china from developing rapidly

a stakeholder approach to the ethicality of bric firm managers use of favors this article investigates the use of favors by managers of bric firms to accomplish business goals the ethicality of which should be determined by the moral reasoning in these countries rather than from a developed country perspective we define a favor as an exchange of outcomes between individuals typically utilizing one s connections that is based on a commonly understood cultural tradition with reciprocity by the receiver typically not being immediate and its value being less than what would constitute bribery within that cultural context this exchange normally takes place between and among members of networks and may involve a network outsider contacted by a network insider on behalf of another insider we see the giver and receiver of the favor as well as network insiders and outsiders as stakeholders additionally society could also be considered to be a stakeholder since the practice of using favors generally inhibits the development of legitimate strong formal institutions since the use of favors in emerging economies is rooted in cultural traditions that we view as informal institutions furthermore we assert that the practice of using favors can lead to bribery which harms society as a stakeholder both morally and economically we posit that bric country managers behaviors stem from informal culturally based practices jeito in brazil blat sviazi in russia jaan pehchaan in india and guanxi in china we utilize institutional theory to explain why favors are relied upon and isct to support the argument that the use of favors in environments like the brics is generally considered ethical

does governance cause growth evidence from china this study tests the causal relationships between quality of governance and economic growth at the provincial level in china during the post mao reform era exploiting the wide cross provincial variation and rapid change over time in governance institutions and economic performance in china during this period covering 1985 2005 the study provides a new perspective on the relationship between governance and growth whereas a large body of prior literature has demonstrated a strong positive association between high quality governance institutions and good economic performance at the cross country level few quantitative studies have explicitly tested the direction of causality between changes in governance quality and changes in economic outcomes this study aims to address this gap in the literature by testing two causal hypotheses on the interplay between provincial level governance and economic performance in china i improvements in provincial quality of governance predict subsequent economic growth rates and ii increases in provincial economic growth rates predict subsequent changes in quality of governance using new heterogeneous granger causality tests that allow for potential differences in the causal relations across provinces i show a significant and positive effect of economic growth on subsequent quality of governance largely driven by growth in the secondary sector but no significant effect of quality of governance on economic growth these findings suggest that improvements in formal governance have not been a key factor driving china s rapid growth instead the observed positive association between governance and growth reflects the ability of provincial governments to harness the potential created by economic growth to implement subsequent governance improvements for researchers studying the effect of governance on growth the results suggest that greater attention should be paid to possible reverse causality from economic outcomes to governance changes

growth efficiency and convergence in china s state and collective industry in china as in the soviet union and eastern europe economic reform initiatives seek to increase productivity by introducing elements of market oriented policies and institutions into an economy formerly dominated by state planning efforts to evaluate the impact of reform of chinese industry have focused on the measurement of productivity change in state enterprises this study expands the prior framework of analysis in several directions our investigation of productivity trends is not limited to state enterprises but includes quantitative comparisons with china s fast growing collective industries which contributed 36 of overall industrial output in 1988 1 unlike previous studies our analysis works with gross rather than net output this permits us to investigate changes in the productivity of intermediate inputs which occupy a large portion of total costs in chinese industry as well as labor and capital to do this we develop a quasi frontier estimation procedure which seems appropriate for comparisons of total factor productivity based on chinese industrial data finally we offer a quantitative perspective on the extent to which reform efforts have moved industrial resource allocation toward patterns expected of a market system the analysis confirms our previous finding based on a restricted framework employing only labor fixed capital and net output that multifactor productivity in state industry has risen substantially during

the dynamic value of mne political embeddedness the case of the chinese automobile industry this paper examines the complex relationship between the embeddedness of multinational enterprises mnes in host country political networks and their long run competitive positions in host emerging markets we report the findings of a longitudinal study of the chinese automobile sector from the early 1980s to the mid 2000s using data from 142 interviews over 11 years and a wide range of secondary sources we explore the process through which the value of political embeddedness changed over time in the face of profound and rapid changes in host country business environments on the basis of this longitudinal study the paper unravels the underlying mechanisms that lead to the declining and even negative value of deep political embeddedness by mnes in a politically stable emerging economy

trust in large organizations several authors suggest that trust is an important determinant of cooperation between strangers in a society and therefore of performance of social institutions we argue that trust should be particularly important for the performance of large organizations in a cross section of countries evidence on government performance participation in civic and professional societies importance of large firms and the performance of social institutions more generally supports this hypothesis moreover trust is lower in countries with dominant hierarchical religions which may have deterred networks of cooperation trust hold up remarkably well on a cross section of countries this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

kinship networks and entrepreneurs in china s transitional economy1 this research draws insights from two theoretical traditions one is new institutionalism which emphasizes the role of institutions both formal and informal in economic growth the other is social network analysis which highlights the role of interpersonal relations in producing and enforcing informal norms integrating these two approaches yields the thesis that social networks affect economic growth via enforcing informal institutions the article focuses on the economic payoff of kinship networks in the context of china s rural industrialization to argue that kin solidarity and kin trust played an important role in protecting the property rights of private entrepreneurs and reducing transaction costs during the early stages of market reform when formal property rights laws were ineffective and market institutions underdeveloped data from 366 villages show that the strength of kinship networks has large positive effects on the count and workforce size of private rural enterprises and insignificant

collective action and network structure i develop and analyze a mathematical model describing the relationship between individual contributions to a collective good and the network of social relations that makes these contributions interdependent starting from the assumption that actors respond to the contributions of others because of efficacy concerns and norms offairness i derive predictions about the impact of network structure on total contributions network density and size influence collective action outcomes in dramatically different ways depending on the structural position of those who make unconditional contributions moreover these effects are highly nonlinear suggesting that the impact of social ties on collective action may be quite sensitive to mobilization contexts

economic development as self discovery in the presence of uncertainty about what a country can be good at producing there can be great social value to discovering costs of domestic activities because such discoveries can be easily imitated we develop a general equilibrium framework for a small open economy to clarify the analytical and normative issues we highlight two failures of the laissez faire outcome there is too little investment and entrepreneurship ex ante and too much production diversification ex post optimal policy consists of counteracting these distortions to encourage investments in the modern sector ex ante but to rationalize production ex post we provide some informal evidence on the building blocks of our model

asian growth and african development since world war ii integration with the world economy has arguably been the chief route from poverty to wealth japan initially exported cheap goods and later moved on to more technologically sophisticated products when japan became rich korea taiwan province of china hong kong sar and singapore replaced japan as low wage exporters and when these countries moved on to more sophisticated products thailand and malaysia filled their niche more recently china has become an important exporter of manufactured goods and india is increasingly moving into services exports no mainland sub saharan african country has experienced this type of transformation even countries that have undergone major economic reforms seem far from takeoff forecasts for africa based on extrapolation of its historical experience tend to be bleak we consider whether it is possible to construct a model consistent with the data which supports a more optimistic view motivated by the asian experience the model assumes countries can potentially undergo rapid economic transformation only if they integrate into the world economy by producing nontraditional exports for the purposes of constructing a long run model of the world economy we are agnostic on whether exports matter due to technological learning by doing spillovers political economy considerations or other factors as each developing country transforms and becomes advanced it further improves trade opportunities for the remaining developing countries for example if china becomes rich a billion more people will live in countries that import toys and a billion fewer will live in countries that export them our approach is similar to that of robert e lucas 2000 in that we assume growth prospects improve with the state of the world economy potentially generating accelerating world growth unlike lucas 2000 however we allow for differential population growth between rich and poor countries the steady state proportion of the world population living in advanced countries depends on the rate at which developing countries transform into advanced ones and on the magnitude of population growth differentials between these two groups of countries the economic transformation process will overcome the demographic trend leading to a prosperous steady state only if the initial share of world population in advanced countries is above a threshold a simple calibration using historical data suggests that the longrun prospects for lagging developing regions may hinge on a race between economic growth in china and india and population growth in the lagging regions particularly africa if the former wins we may eventually observe accelerating global growth this suggests some caution should be used when interpreting empirical studies on growth determinants as these results may not be stable over time country characteristics that lead to poor performances today may well allow for rapid growth in the future if and when the world economy reaches a sufficiently advanced stage our model also suggests a queuing effect where the order in which countries are absorbed into the world economy is determined by the quality of their policies economic reforms in one country may potentially have a large impact on growth if they move the country to the front of the queue but similar reforms in all countries may have a much smaller impact on world growth

social networks and collective action a theory of the critical mass iii most analyses of collective action agree that overcoming the freerider problem requires organizing potential contributors thus making their decisions interdependent the potential for organizing depends on the social ties in the group particularly on the overall density or frequency of ties on the extent to which they are centralized in a few individuals and on the costs of communicating and coordinating actions through these ties mathematical analysis and computer simulations extend a formal microsocial theory of interdependent collective action to treat social networks and organization costs as expected the overall density of social ties in a group improves its prospects for collective action more significant because less expected are the findings that show that the centralization of network ties always has a positive effect on collective action and that the negative effect of costs on collective action declines as the group s resource or interest heterogeneity increases these nonobvious resu

local governments as industrial firms an organizational analysis of china s transitional economy despite widespread skepticism about government ownership in transitional economies china s rapid industrial growth has been led by public enterprises kornai s theory of soft budbet constraints born of the failure of earlier hungarian reforms fosters such skepticism but it assumes as fixed organizational characteristics that in fact vary widely across government jurisdictions local governments with smaller industrial bases have clearer financial incentives and constraints fewer nonfinancial interests in enterprises and a greater capacity to monitor them in china s vast public sector the fastest growth in output and productivity has occurred where government ownership rights are clearest and most easily enforced which enables officials to manage public industry as a diversified market oriented firm

entrepreneurial ability venture investments and risk sharing a number of issues that relate to the desirability and implications of new venture financing are examined within a principal agent framework that captures the essence of the relationship between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists the model suggests 1 as long as the skill levels of entrepreneurs are common knowledge all will choose to involve venture capital investors since the risk sharing provided by outside participation dominates the agency relationship that is created 2 the less able entrepreneurs will choose to involve venture capitalists whereas the more profitable ventures will be developed without external participation because of the adverse selection problem associated with asymmetric information 3 if a costly signal is available that conveys the entrepreneur s ability some entrepreneurs will invest in such a signal and then sell to investors these entrepreneurs however need not be the more able ones the implications for new venture financing of these and other findings are discussed and illustrated by example

the distinctiveness of entrepreneurship in transition economies this paper is concerned with the distinctiveness of entrepreneurship and small business development in countries that are at different stages of transformation to market based economies following a discussion of the potential relevance of selected conceptualisations of entrepreneurship to transition conditions the authors present original empirical data referring to the characteristics of entrepreneurs and their businesses from countries at different stages of market reform distinctive features of entrepreneurial behaviour identified reflect the unstable and hostile nature of the external environment and the scarcity of key resources particularly capital in an unstable and weakly structured environment informal networks often play a key role in helping entrepreneurs to mobilise resources win orders and cope with the constraints imposed by highly bureaucratic structures and often unfriendly officials moreover the social context inherited from the former socialist period appears to affect both the attitudes and behaviour of entrepreneurs and the attitudes of society at large towards entrepreneurship

a simple test of the thesis that committee jurisdictions shape corporate pac contributions the results presented in the previous section tend to confirm the hypothesis that committee assignments shape the pattern of corporate pac contributions this note corroborates existing research on corporate pacs at a significantly lower level of aggregation than the samples on which existing research has been conducted further because a nonparametric test was used rather than the more standard regressional analysis these results should increase our confidence that the essential institutions of government affect and engender responses by economic agents

federalism chinese style the political basis for economic success in china china s remarkable economic success rests on a foundation of political reform providing a considerable degree of credible commitment to markets this reform reflects a special type of institutionalized decentralization that the authors call federalism chinese style this form of decentralization has three consequences first it fosters competition not only in product markets but also among local governments for labor and foreign capital this competition in turn encourages local government experimentation and learning with new forms of enterprises regulation and economic relationships second it provides incentives for local governments to promote local economic prosperity finally it provides a significant amount of protection to local governments and their enterprises from political intrusion by the central government

institutional polycentrism entrepreneurs social networks and new venture growth what is the interrelationship among formal institutions social networks and new venture growth drawing on the theory of institutional polycentrism and social network theory we examine this question using data on 637 entrepreneurs from four different countries we find the confluence of weak and inefficient formal institutions to be associated with a larger number of structural holes in entrepreneurial social networks while the effect of this institutional order on the revenue growth of new ventures is negative a network s structural holes have a positive effect on revenue growth furthermore the positive effect of structural holes on revenue growth is stronger in an environment with a more adverse institutional order i e weaker and more inefficient institutions the contributions and implications of these findings are discussed abstract from author