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This paper offers an up-to-date review of Enterprise Zone programs across states in the U.S. An Enterprise Zone program often focuses on target locations, populations, and/or industries. Enterprise Zone program designs and implementations vary between states. The expected outcomes are likely to differ from the desired outcome, which is to revitalize Enterprise Zone areas. This paper also provides a review of the existing Enterprise Zone empirical literature on program effectiveness assessments. There are conflicting recommendations, even for the same Enterprise Zone program. To assess whether research design contributes to this situation, the paper explores several research design factors, including outcome measure, time span, spatial unit, data choice, and control of endogeneity. Information on these research factors in the existing literature is collected and coded. Descriptive and correlation analyses suggest that outcome measure, spatial unit, post-program time span, and the choice of an endogeneity control method have significant impacts on program effectiveness assessments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article features several notable people related to education, in the U.S. Edwin E. Howell of Washington, D.C. was considered to have the most perfect collections in mineralogy for school use placed on sale. A new corporation related to general school supply business was formed by J. L. Hammett, who is favorably known to the educational public, after being active in business. A man of large experience in the paper trade, H. H. Young, then, associated himself in this new enterprise.

This article investigates the link between board members' past professional experiences and the terms and conditions of the debt contracts of their current firms. In particular, we examine whether directors' past bankruptcy experience affects the pricing and nonpricing terms of public debt contracts. Using a sample of 8,142 bond issues in the United States in the period 1995 to 2015, we document higher credit spreads and smaller bond sizes for firms with such directors, suggesting that bondholders are concerned about past bankruptcy experience. Our results remain robust to different model specifications. This effect is moderated for bankruptcies that are likely driven by macroeconomic shocks such as the dotcom bubble and the global financial crisis. We also show that our findings are not explained by bond issuers with an elevated risk of default and seem instead to be driven by directors serving on key monitoring committees, indicating that prior bankruptcy experience raises concerns about the company's corporate governance. Finally, mediation analysis offers some evidence of a limited negative indirect effect of prior bankruptcy experience on the terms of debt contracts through the firm's financial and investment policies. Overall, our findings suggest that lenders incorporate information about past professional experiences of directors into public debt contracting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the firm's opting out decision and the impact of the 1990 Pennsylvania Antitakeover Law on the stock prices of 123 firms. The results indicate that on average Pennsylvania stock returns decreased by 9 percent from introduction to passage. A comparison indicates that firms that opted out had CARs 18 percentage points higher than firms that chose not to opt out. The event study methodology may not be appropriate because investors may anticipate the passage of legislation and because there may be multiple events. Intervention analysis, an econometric technique not previously used in this area, is applied and the results support the agency cost hypothesis. A logit model is implemented to find the sources of the losses and gains and to study why firms choose to opt out. In this model, firms are controlled for antitakeover amendments, takeover activity, insider holdings, large noninsider holdings, size, and industry. Firms with a proxy for lower agency costs were found to be more likely to opt out of the legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategy-by-doing perspective argues that firms operating in highly dynamic environments can benefit from taking strategic actions in lieu of advance planning because such actions have learning effects that help the firm keep pace with changes in the environment. The implicit assumption is that strategy by doing is effective in dynamic environments but likely not in stable environments. This study challenges this notion and expands the purview of the strategy-by-doing perspective. We first argue that strategy by doing is generally an effective strategy due to the organizational learning it facilitates. We next discuss how environmental dynamism is multidimensional, encompassing both market and technological dynamism. The positive effects of strategy by doing on product-market performance are amplified in highly dynamic environments that feature high levels of both market and technological dynamism. We go on to argue that stable environments are also suitable for strategy by doing, where it can facilitate opportunity creation. However, strategy by doing may hinder performance in mixed environments where one form of dynamism is present and the other is not. Focusing on strategy by doing in the form of product changes, our analysis of 4,000 firms over a period of 20 years shows support for our arguments about environmental contingencies affecting the relationship between strategy by doing and performance. We discuss how these findings have implications for theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of industrial relations in the United States is largely rooted in the early twentieth-century writings of John R. Commons and the Wisconsin School. The author documents and describes their strategy and recommended policy approach for improved industrial relations. The three core components of their strategy were stabilization of markets, equalization of bargaining power, and constitutional government in industrial enterprise. The author also shows that the thinking of Commons and his associates on the best way to achieve these three goals--and, in particular, their view of the appropriate mix of trade unionism, labor law, personnel management, and macroeconomic monetary/ fiscal policy--evolved through four distinct phases, starting about 1900 and ending in the late 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevancy of changing prices in accounting for asset values for U.S. industries is explored. The analysis compares the economic value of assets with accounting-based valuations -- historical and current cost -- in an inflationary environment. A simulation is employed to estimate the magnitude of the errors of current cost and historical cost reporting. The results of the simulation indicate that where firms use sum-of-years-digits depreciation, current cost accounting is more accurate than historical cost accounting for all but 1 of the 32 asset classes tested. Where firms use straight-line depreciation, current cost accounting is more accurate for all classes of structures but not for all classes of equipment. For equipment under straight-line depreciation, the relative accuracy of current cost was directly related to the rate of inflation and inversely related to the rate of growth of asset outlays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author marshals evidence that partners in Big Eight firms, as well as the firms themselves, have engaged significantly less in advocacy writing in the accounting literature during the last decade compared with the output of articles and firm publications on controversial topics that appeared in the 1960s. He suggests several likely explanations for this trend in the literature, including the increasing competitiveness of public accounting and the transfer of standards-setting authority from a part-time board in which the Big Eight firms played a major role to the full-time Financial Accounting Standards Board. Other explanatory factors are the litigious climate and congressional oversight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses current controversies over push-down accounting and reporting for unconsolidated subsidiaries in the U.S. as of March 1986. Accounting for unconsolidated subsidiaries including the use of push-down and carve-out accounting is a problem that was first addressed in Accounting Research Bulletin No. 51 (ARB No. 51). In attempting to mandate consolidated financial reporting, ARB No. 51 appears to have encouraged the opposite. The main question to be considered in push-down accounting is whether there are circumstances in which the cost of the acquiring entity in a purchase-business combination should be imputed to the acquired entity. If an individual acquires all of a company's stock, one traditionally uses the company's historical cost information in the preparation of financial statements. On a related subject, the Securities and Exchange Commission has issued Staff Accounting Bulletin No. 55, which expresses the staff's views concerning the allocation of expenses and related disclosures in financial statements of subsidiaries, divisions, or lesser business components of another entity. In general, the staff believes that the historical income statements of a registrant should reflect all of its costs of doing business. Therefore, in specific situations, the staff has required the subsidiary to revise its financial statements to include certain expenses incurred by the parent on its behalf.

This paper examines institutional entrepreneurship in the development of China's environmental protection system (EPS) over a period of almost 30 years. China's EPS evolved in four main stages, the boundaries of which were marked by transition-critical events. Within each stage, institutional entrepreneurs conducted activities that supported trajectories of field development. These activities are analysed according to the way they contributed to the construction of regulative, normative and cognitive institutional system pillars. The formation of the EPS as an organizational field in China was characterized by a ‘made order’ in which the regulative system came first and the state and its agencies dominated the process as the principal institutional entrepreneurs. In this respect it contrasts with the evolution of the same field in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates the construction of CEO charisma within the US stock market. By metaphorically employing the myth of the Minotaur, we discuss three forces underlying the rise of heroic CEO images in the USA: Ariadne, or charismatic leadership theory and its formulation of charisma; Theseus, or the CEOs struggling to obtain power over stock market actors; and the Minotaur, or the stock market itself and the securities analyst profession. Building on the literature on organizational symbolism, we present a qualitative study of two CEO successions, focusing on the form and content of the persona and the vision projected by CEOs and elaborated by securities analysts. The results suggest that jointly constructing charisma through discourse, CEOs and analysts enact a form of power that does not lie in top-down coercion, but rather on the emergent, active involvement and contribution of its very subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following paper the impact on the number of firms is estimated for the California Enterprise Zone Program from 1987 to 1991, the years of operation for the first series of enterprise zones in the state. Data for the estimates for the change in the number of firms derived from the County Business Pattern data of the U.S. Census Bureau. The relative change in the number of firms is estimated using a Two-Way Fixed Effects Model. The results indicate that some types of firms in terms of their size as measured by their number of employees and industry type may indeed have produced some positive employment effects for those enterprise zones considered in the study. Caution should be taken however in placing too much weight on the results of the study given the number of theoretical and empirical issues that can create doubt with respect to the efficacy of enterprise zone programs in their ability to provide net changes in social welfare for economic distressed areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines first contract campaigns at five multinational corporations. The case studies include a cross-section of unions and a variety of industries. Several common patterns in the cases highlight important strategic considerations for unions. First, solid organizational structures and rank-and-file activism serve as a prerequisite for sustainable campaigns. Second, strategic considerations of external factors, such as the union's strength in the industry and leverage capacity contribute to successful campaigns. Third, the level of resistance varies widely across employers and strongly affecs the campaign. Finally, while the legal framework of bargaining matters, it emerges as a source of last hope against highly resistant employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the 20th century, a sizeable proportion of the workforce in the United States had access to a combination of dispute resolution and voice options through the union grievance process. The vast majority of today's workforce, however, no longer does. The focus of this article is the proliferation of alternative relational exchange models developed in non-union firms. The author develops a theoretical framework proposing variation in the overarching non-union models employed by firms as a function of distinct organizational features and strategies. These models are the product of distinct configurations of voice and dispute-resolution strategies. The author proposes five alternative non-union models, discusses the internal and external characteristics associated with them, and evaluates distinct employer and worker outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an historical analysis of the principles of local government organization that have been accepted in Britain and the United States. The central thesis is that these principles express an ‘economist’ conception of politics and the state. Local governments have been variously conceived—as business corporations, consumers' cooperatives, and institutions of the state—but in each case they have been assigned a restricted, essentially instrumental purpose. This purpose is connected to economic welfare, which, it is supposed, requires centralization of government. Thus the prevalent economist conceptions of local government condemn the local polity to a tenuous existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to provide an economic logic for the view that increased worker participation will lead to improved health and safety conditions at the workplace.' The variable that worker participation can importantly influence is the mix of technology employed at the workplace; this mix in turn determines the level of job hazards. Without adequate worker participation, the choice of technology and the path of research for new technology tends to be biased against workers. This bias has an economic origin that can lead a firm to select a "socially" inefficient technology even though its choice appears optimal on the basis of a "private" (e.g., the firm's) calculus. The essential point of this paper is that increased worker participation will lead to a more "socially" efficient technology that will in turn reduce job hazards. Worker participation is a relative concept, referring to the degree of worker input into both major and minor decisions that affect the workplace and conditions of employment. All workers have some degree of influence over a firm's decision-making. This influence can vary from the "vote with your feet" option available in a "free market" to the extensive input that might exist in a worker-owned environment.

Interest in organizations first appeared between World War I and World War II, with the American studies led by Mayo. Since then, interest has grown and spread to most industrialized countries. In the sixties, in Anglo-Saxon countries and especially in the United States where research was first conducted, organizational analysis developed into an independent field of investigation. Economic growth, the proliferation and expansion of organizations and a marked tendency 'to rationalize the world' have compelled an increasing number of Western researchers to question the social dynamics of organized groups. This interest has been reinforced over the past few years by the failure of collectivist solutions, the growing popularity of private enterprise as well as by the type of management thinking that presently predominates in Western countries, but more generally by the prevalence of thinking about the world in organizational terms. Given this general tendency, which is observable in most industrialized countries, this paper aims to demonstrate how Francophone analysis has evolved and remains distinct to this day from Anglophone - and more particularly from the American mainstream - analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we study the contagion effects of accounting restatements issued by foreign firms traded in the United States. Specifically, we predict and find that accounting restatements that negatively affect the share prices of the restating foreign firms raise investor concerns that nonrestating foreign firms from the same home countries have similar accounting issues, and therefore induce a negative stock market reaction to nonrestating home country peer firms. We refer to this as a restatement-induced home country contagion effect. On average, nonrestating home country peer firms experience a negative stock market return of approximately −0.69% over a 3-day window around the restatement announcement. Moreover, we hypothesize and show that the strength of the home market rule of law (ROL) affects investor assessment of the likelihood that peer firms have similar accounting issues, and therefore affects the magnitude of the contagion. Specifically, nonrestating home country peer firms from countries with weak ROL experience an average stock price decline of approximately −1.32%, whereas peer firms from strong ROL countries experience an average negative return of only −0.26% over the 3-day window around the restatement. These results suggest that restatements filed by weak ROL firms are perceived to be more "contagious" than those filed by strong ROL firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms innovate their new processes and products not only within their countries but also across national boundaries. This is known as cross‐border innovation, and many countries have initiated policies to support it. But how does government support influence cross‐border innovation? Through the lens of Porter's diamond model, this study conceptualizes government support as slack resources and investigates how it affects a firm's inventive activities in an uncertain, competitive global market. This study examines Chinese firms' patent filings in the United States under the enactment of the "innovative city" policy. We apply matching and generalized difference‐in‐differences techniques to this staggered quasi‐experimental setting and find that government support stimulates firms' cross‐border innovation. We further show that firms with higher research and development capacity take better advantage of government support. Finally, we show that government support leads to a rebalancing of exploratory and exploitative innovation such that a firm that has conducted more exploration will perform more exploitation and vice versa. Taken together, this study extends our understanding of slack from internal resources to government support in the context of global operations. Findings suggest that government actions that improve the ecosystem of innovation in one country strengthen firms' innovation and competitiveness overseas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large corporations dominate economic and social life in the United States and around the globe. The mainstream corporate governance ideology of "shareholder primacy" claims that the exclusive purpose of a corporation is to generate returns for shareholders, which means that governance decisions should be exclusively in their hands. However, shareholder primacy lacks a theory of how companies innovate, and instead focuses solely on allocation of corporate profits, misunderstanding the relationship of shareholders to the twenty-first-century corporation. The theory of the corporation as an innovative enterprise—engaged in productive innovation by producing higher-quality goods and services for lower unit costs—is an accurate way to understand what makes corporations successful producers. Stakeholder theory from progressive legal scholarship illustrates specific corporate governance institutions that can assist innovation, including fiduciary duty, stakeholder participation in decision making, and equity ownership. This article contributes to the growing literature refuting shareholder primacy by utilizing the theories of the innovative enterprise and multi-stakeholder governance to propose reshaping US corporate governance to better to serve innovation in production and a balance of power in distributional decision making. JEL classification: B50, D21, G30, G35, K22 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regional science research requires data sets with detailed geography. Dissemination of data sets with sufficient geographic specificity challenges statistical agencies in terms of protecting respondent privacy. The U.S. Census Bureau first released decennial census microdata in the 1960s. Today, public versions of largely demographic surveys enjoy widespread use but limit the geographic detail of individual observations. With business data, firm and establishment distributions are highly skewed, preventing release of public use microdata versions. To sup- port its own statistical programs by giving external researchers access to internal versions of public use data files, the Census Bureau created the Center for Economic Studies (CES) and a national network of Research Data Centers (RDCs). This model permits researchers access to confidential economic and demographic data under secure, controlled conditions. This article describes the CES-RDC enterprise, provides descriptions of available data sets and their spatial identifiers, and outlines issues and challenges facing the RDC network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the US corporate law approach to persuading companies to adopt environmentally-conscious management practices, and considers the corresponding Japanese situation. The US Securities Laws have an environmental disclosure system for investors, which helps investors to exert market forces on companies to address ecological management actively. Shareholders have used shareholder proposal systems actively to request that companies better address such issues, including higher-level environmental disclosure. These measure are worth considering, so that both the managers and owners of companies recognize that environmentally-conscious management is a significant part of good corporate governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family ownership and control are still significant in the majority of business enterprises in the United States. A high percentage of these companies face special problems particularly related to corporate development and transition from an enterpreneurial to a professional management structure. The dual criteria for corporate membership (family and professional competence) require special management efforts. Without these efforts, organizational rigidities develop which undermine the corporation's ability to function effectively. While the relevance of the interaction between family relationships and the working environment of organizational effectiveness has been recognized, family systems and organization approaches have never been simultaneously applied in the study of family- dominated businesses. In this paper we develop a scheme that is derived from principles of organizational and family-systems theory. We describe a set of processes and mechanisms that define and regulate the interaction between the business and family system. We show the applicability of these concepts to the study of adaptation and maladaptation in the family-dominated corporation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concern of this inquiry is with management strategy in a large, inter- national public accounting firm. The large accounting firm must deal with a variety of difficult problems in its efforts to grow and remain successful. Borrowing from the terminology of Emery and Trist, the interrelatedness of many of these problems tends to suggest a "turbulent field environment." In this paper, an observation approach is used to discover the strategy which the large accounting firm employs in its attempt to deal with a complex and changing environment. Results indicate that there is a three- pronged strategy consisting of providing clients with a tangible product (Doing), marketing the image of the firm to the business community (Representing), and marketing the image of competence and integrity of the firm to the government and society (Being). Indications are that the firm is successful in dealing with its environment on a piecemeal and short-run basis. Implications for the long run are less clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the growth of the school supply business in the U.S. The city of Salt Lake gave one order for pens, pencils, crayons, inks, mucilage, scratch paper, erasers, pointers, practice paper, drawing paper, pencil sharpeners, letter paper, and office envelopes. There were samples of a single order for a small city.

Organizational theory recognizes reputation as a central element to understanding the firm. Examining investor valuations of 1,676 initial public offerings (IPOs) in the United States from 1990 to 2011, we find that reputation transfer through an association of an IPO firm with a venture capital (VC) firm represents a resource whose value can increase/decrease over time depending on investors' valuations of prior IPOs funded by a VC firm. We conclude that the impact of reputation transfer through association is not unidirectional but, instead, is to be viewed in the context of prior reputational development of organizations the focal firm is associated with. Furthermore, we find that three "transfer enhancers" can improve the impact of VC firm reputation transfer on IPO valuations, including the VC firm's past experience intensity, the diversity of IPO experiences, and the number of prior syndicated IPOs involving the VC firm as a lead investor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate whether men and women respond differently to competition and whether this response depends on the gender mix of the group, the author examines outcomes of the Mellon Foundation's Graduate Education Initiative, a competitive fellowship program instituted in 1991 that was aimed at increasing graduation rates and decreasing time to degree. Men's performance, as measured by time to candidacy, increased 10% in response to the program, with the largest gains for men in departments with the highest proportions of female students. Women did not increase performance, on average, but the response of women did differ greatly depending on the gender mix of their peers, with a more positive response when a larger fraction of the group was female. These results suggest that when devising incentive schemes, policy-makers may need to be mindful of an inherent tradeoff between increasing aggregate outcomes through the use of competition and achieving gender equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two well-documented empirical findings are that unionized employees typically receive substantially higher compensation than their non-union counterparts and that union representation in the United States has declined over time. Some observers have hypothesized a causal link between these two phenomena: the achievement of a union wage premium, they argue, hastened union decline both by reducing union firms' economic competitiveness and by inducing employers to adopt various union avoidance strategies. Using data from the Current Population Survey and the Census Bureau's Census of Construction, the authors test this hypothesis for the construction industry. Even in estimations that allow for a lagged response and incorporate a variety of controls, they find no evidence that high union/nonunion wage ratios in construction in the 1970s or 1980s resulted in lower union membership in 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central theme in much of the franchising literature is that franchising mitigates the Principle–agent problems between the owner of the franchise company and the operator of the local establishment by making the operator the owner-franchisee of the establishment. Despite the centrality of that assumption in the literature, there is little empirical evidence to support it. We use Census of Retail Trade data for essentially all full- and limited-service restaurants in the United States to test whether franchisee-ownership affects performance at the establishment level. We find a strong and robust franchise effect for full-service restaurants but little effect among limited-service restaurants. We argue this difference is consistent with agency costs given differences in work processes and the importance of managerial discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces a series of article about accountants' liability for the accuracy of audits in U.S. business enterprises.

Despite congressional fears, society has allowed substantial concentration of managerial decision making via the conglomerate merger movement of the last twenty years. To restrict the adaptation of bargaining structures would further diminish local control over local issues. While allowing centralization of essentially authoritarian bureaucracy, it does not become us now to fear centralization of bargaining and union structure in response, which can be the means by which local issues are brought before centralized management with greater vigor. Unions, unlike management, are basically grass-roots organizations. They have a long history of coordinating centralized bargaining structures which have arisen out of basic interdependencies with localized interests of their membership. In recent years, their versatility in this regard seems to be increasing. Students of the American labor scene have been emphasizing the desirability of collective bargaining structure adapting to a changed environment, specifically by way of further centralization of bargaining structure. Thus, Weber argues: such circumstances is both unrealistic and unproductive. It is time the general views of students of the American labor scene were aired in conjunction with the facts of both antitrust and labor policy. More and more we are being treated to literature questioning the continued viability of the institution of collective bargaining in a context of rapid change, while ignoring the details of public policy which operate to restrict adaptation by the very institution under criticism. Recommendations made here are made in a spirit of gradualism and with the realistic expectation of continued problems under such policy modification. But they should strengthen the institution of collective bargaining, largely by allowing the inventiveness and flexibility of the process more room in which to operate. In so doing, they may delay further the serious consideration of much less appetizing institutional alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary argues that scholars need an alternative to the dominance in academic research of the U.S. model of entrepreneurship to reflect better the variety and diversity of entrepreneurial activities around the globe. Using the example of China, today the world's second-largest economy, we discuss how researchers miss key elements of entrepreneurship because of their over-reliance on the U.S. model of entrepreneurship for analysis, espousing Western-based theoretical values and foundations. We discuss how researchers and journals can promote future research efforts focusing on indigenous entrepreneurship activities, applying indigenously developed theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the determinants of the shadow economy across American states, with emphasis on cross-border spillover effects. Results show positive spillovers of shadow activities across state borders with different specifications. In other effects, greater unionization in a state induces businesses to go underground, while states without a sales tax had a smaller shadow economy, ceteris paribus. Greater state product checked shadow growth, with military and nonmilitary state products having opposite effects. Finally, states bordering Canada and Mexico had different flows from the shadow sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses on what can communications media can do to help Puerto Ricans to work with others for social progress in the U.S. In lieu of the scheduled background paper sociologist Ralph Salazar presented a plan for a "centralized, objective and professionally-run press relations committee" to handle press releases from Puerto Ricans. The purpose of the committee would be to process news effectively that is now ineffectively disseminated. Members of the committee would be experienced volunteer newsmen and newswomen representing various news agencies. The committee will evaluate such communications for their news value and prepare news releases, have them, mimeographed, and mail them to all the communications media in the New York area most likely to be interested. Releases would always be mailed out well in advance of the event being publicized.

The importance of information technologies in regional economic performance is widely accepted but only widely studied in more populous regions in the United States. Local and state development practitioners and policy makers actively court and promote Information Technology (IT)—intensive industries in rural areas. Despite various promotional efforts, relatively little is known about the specific location requirements of such industries, however, especially in lower population areas of the United States such as the mostly rural Midwest. In this article, the authors examine the location choice preferences of firms in three IT industry sectors in metro, metro-adjacent, and nonmetro regions using a highly detailed data set of Kansas industries. The modeling framework combines both conditional logit and Poisson regression models. The results indicate that average establishment size, industry clustering, labor intensity, and county employment growth explain variations in industry location choice preferences across regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study purpose is to gain insight into changing diverse management approaches to corporate philanthropy in a period that spans both from economic boom and recession. First, the authors present an overview of Spanish corporate philanthropy and compare it to U.S. corporate philanthropy. The authors find a significant gap between the U.S. and Spain’s corporate philanthropic spending as a percentage of profits and different trends between the two. A significant similarity is that the economic downturn is having a lower impact on spending than was predicted. The authors then focus on eight Spanish companies to explore how firms manage their philanthropy. The authors present a management model matrix that provides a framework for philanthropy management types and throws up divergent results for both society and companies. It seems that those companies that are managing philanthropy in a more sustainable way are not cutting their spending in this field despite falling profits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do cultural intermediaries mediate the introduction of new technologies which may challenge the legitimacy of their daily decision-making practices? Using the case of acquisition editors in the US trade publishing industry and the release of BookScan, the first point-of-sale data service for US book publishers, this work highlights the adoption of market-driven data into practices which traditionally have relied on editors’ dispositions, intuitions and aesthetic sensibilities. The findings highlight ways in which acquisition editors integrate BookScan data into their daily work within publishing firms, as well the creative ways in which they use BookScan’s legitimacy to pursue projects of their choosing. Ten years after the introduction of BookScan, while the data service cannot be ignored, acquisition editors navigate its application, protecting both their cultural capital as ‘arbiters of taste’ within publishing firms and their ability to promote works they deem to be of cultural value or import. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that existing theories of new and small firms fail to capture the temporal diversity of such enterprises. Most are ‘one-way bets’ because they provide an explanation only for growing firms. To address this, this article combines the role of chance with the optimism of the business owner into optimism and chance (OC) theory. This provides an insight into why, for example, very few new or small firms grow continuously and why, when compared to Europe, individuals in the USA who initially failed in business, ultimately became successful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: (I) they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality -namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; (2) they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this "winner-take-all" pattern; and (3) they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway (or lack thereof) of the "median voter" in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change -one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests -fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars have long emphasized the importance of entrepreneurs to long-term growth prospects, entrepreneurship often receives less attention by policy makers than traditional industrial recruitment efforts as regional growth engines. The effects of entrepreneurship may be more subtle than the latter approaches, but business creation can have significant effects across both space and time. This article first sketches the important relationship between innovation, entrepreneurship, and growth and then empirically assesses the relationship between entrepreneurship and job growth across U.S. labor market areas and counties. Three key findings emerge. First, entrepreneurship is systematically related to job growth; furthermore, this relationship increases in intensity over time. Second, entrepreneurship has the greatest impact on the county in which it occurs but also generates positive spillovers for job growth in neighboring counties. Finally, the impact of entrepreneurship is greater in denser, more urbanized settings where such businesses can leverage the advantages of a thick marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporate community responsiveness relates to business activities that are integral parts of a firm's operations and are designed to benefit the firm through benefiting the local communities. Using data from commercial banks in the United States between 1997 and 2000, the authors measured banks' corporate community responsiveness by their Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) lending activities and their performance ratings by CRA examiners. The authors developed and tested eight hypotheses on the influence of contextual (community income, minority population, and competition) and organizational (age, profitability, risk, institutional ownership, and mergers and acquisitions) factors on the two measures of corporate community responsiveness. The authors found a negative effect for minority population; a positive effect for banks' profitability; and partial support for community income, competition, and risk factors. The results show no effects for institutional ownership or mergers and acquisitions. The implications of these results for the instrumental aspect of stakeholder theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the outcomes of contractual relationships between American local governments and private service providers. Researchers have approached the issue of contract administration and performance from a variety of theoretical perspectives, each providing its own insight into how to manage contractual relationships effectively. The analysis, which is based on a unique data set of more than 400 contractual relationships, focuses on the effects of contract monitoring, competition, and trust on contracting performance. The results of the analysis indicate that trust has an independent positive effect on overall contracting performance, as well as on eight specific dimensions of performance. In most of the models tested, monitoring and competition were not related to contracting performance. The relationship between monitoring and contracting performance appears to be more complex than previously thought, involving interactions with moderating variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Renewed scholarly interest in clusters of firms has increased attention on institutions-including business associations-that serve them. Scholars investigating "labor market intermediaries" also wonder to what extent employers' associations conduct workforce development. Much research has been done on business associations in Europe and less developed countries; less studied are those in the United States. This article fills this gap by reporting survey results from 716 American business associations. The article asks, To what extent do American business associations engage in economic development activities beyond lobbying? Does involvement in economic development predict involvement in workforce development? and Are those who engage in more strategic economic development activities more likely to conduct strategic workforce development? Using regression analysis, we find that a substantial share are involved in more strategic economic and workforce development activities and that economic development-specifically, more strategic activities-is a strong predictor of engagement in workforce-related activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate the empirical link between prevailing levels of crime and the viability of small businesses. Using confidential microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau's Characteristics of Business Owners Survey, they find, on balance, that young firms operating in high-crime niches in urban America appear not to be disadvantaged by crime. Crime's impact may certainly be harmful, with other factors being constant, but the crux of the findings is that other factors are not constant. Firms most negatively affected by crime do not appear to be less viable than otherwise identical firms reporting that crime has no effect on their businesses. High-crime niches may in fact be rational choices for some business owners, present and potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent U.S. Tenth Circuit decision questions whether the routine activity theory of hotspots applies to adult businesses located in sparsely populated rural areas. Although few criminologists are interested in urban-rural differences, the Tenth Circuit decision makes this topic acutely relevant to policy makers and courts. To address the threshold question, the hotspot theory is analyzed to demonstrate its generality to urban, suburban, and rural locations. The results of a corroborating case study are then presented. When an adult entertainment business opens on an interstate highway off-ramp to a small rural village, total crime rises by 60%. Alternative explanations related to uncontrolled threats to internal validity are considered and ruled out. After reporting the results of the case study, the consequences of the theory and results for policy makers and courts are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on institutional theory and entrepreneurial cognition, we test the environmental perception-scanning framework in the United States and India. The results suggest that culture and transition context help explain scanning frequency, but entrepreneurs in the two countries are similar in their perceptions of strategic uncertainty in environmental sectors. Moreover, the perceptions of increased environmental change and sector importance, as conditioned by perceived information accessibility, are associated with increased scanning. Overall, our results provide important indications about perceptions and information seeking, and lend support to indications of a universal mindset of entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exploratory study of urban entrepreneurs participating in a technical assistance program finds that they focus on the bottom line and often have an explicit wish to improve their community. This integrated combination of economic and social values, a kind of civic-minded capitalism, guides their positioning for growth and yields a business that can best be called a ‘civic enterprise.’ A descriptive analysis of qualitative and quantitative research yields propositions for future research on these hybrid business ventures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between social stratification and entrepreneurship is one that is underexplored in the literature of management and organizations. In the authors’ view, social stratification (social structure, institutions, and culture) influences the context, process, experience, and outcomes of entrepreneurship. In this article, the authors discuss these relationships in the context of African American women engaged in high-growth entrepreneurship. The authors support their premise by presenting the limitations of prevailing approaches that exist within the current minority and women entrepreneurship literatures. Using the concept of entrepreneurial success as an example, the authors demonstrate how a social stratification and entrepreneurship framework may be useful for scholars who seek to understand the process of entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research findings are based on a national survey of 350 African American business owners whose companies had ten to one hundred employees. Each quarter of 2002 and 2003, owners were randomly selected and interviewed. Companies were classified into three groups according to their annual employment growth over five years: gazelles (20 percent or greater rate of growth), growth-oriented firms (1 to 19 percent), and no-growth firms (less than 1 percent or negative). In comparison to no-growth finns, gazelles were more likely to market to the government sector, less likely to compete on the basis of price, more likely to serve regional and national markets, and more likely to have fewer African Americans workers. CEOs of no-growth companies were more likely to have entered business because they lost a previous job. Surprisingly, no statistically significant differences appeared in thirty-nine other variables that defined owner attributes, firm characteristics, and business strategies of gazelles and no-growth firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the performance of investments made by venture-capital (VC) funds that specialize in financing minority business enterprises (MBEs). Existing studies document that MBEs have less access to financing-equity as well as debt-than similarly situated firms owned by nonminority whites. The apparent existence of a discriminatory financing environment creates an underserved market and, hence, attractive opportunities are available to firms capable of identifying and serving MBE financing needs. Analyzing cash-flow data on VC investments, we find that the minority-oriented funds earned yields on their realized equity investments that were slightly higher than the returns reported by mainstream VC funds. Considering differences in methodologies used to generate rate-of-return data for the MBE-as opposed to the nonminority-oriented funds-we conclude that the minority VC funds are earning yields on their realized investments that are at least equivalent to those of the broader VC industiy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]