There is a major debate regarding the role of concentrated family ownership and control in large firms, with three positions suggesting that such concentration is (1) good, (2) bad, or (3) irrelevant for firm value. Why are there such differences? We theorize that the impact of family ownership and control on firm value is associated with the level of shareholder protection embodied in legal and regulatory institutions of a country. Data from 634 publicly listed large family firms in seven Asian countries (Hong Kong, Indonesia,

Using bankruptcy laws as a case of formal institutions, we show how formal institutions impact entrepreneurship development. Historically, bankruptcy laws usually have been harsh. Recently, many governments have realized that entrepreneur-friendly bankruptcy laws can not only lower exit barriers, but also lower entry barriers for entrepreneurs. Since bankruptcy laws are not uniform around the world, it is important to understand how they differ in their friendliness to entrepreneurs. This article focuses on six dimensions of entrepreneur-friendliness: (1) the availability of a reorganization bankruptcy option, (2) the time spent on bankruptcy procedures, (3) the cost of bankruptcy procedures, (4) the opportunity to have a fresh start in liquidation bankruptcy, (5) the opportunity to have an automatic stay of assets during reorganization bankruptcy, and (6) the opportunity for entrepreneurs and managers to remain on the job after filing for bankruptcy. In an effort to cover both developed and emerging economies and to draw on geographically diverse examples,

Abstract While prominent differences in corporate governance exist across the Asia Pacific region, there are common concerns about controlling shareholders expropriating wealth from minority shareholders at the expense of overall wealth creation, as well as about the roles and qualifications of managers in Asian companies. The contributors to this Special Issue of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management address these concerns and provide new evidence on their empirical relevance, as well as the factors conditioning that relevance. They also provide cautionary insight into the merits of specific proposals to reform Asian corporate governance. An important theme emerging from this Special Issue is that one needs to understand the institutional framework in which organizations operate in order to understand the We thank Saturna Capital Corporation and Nick Kaiser (Director and Chairman) for financial support that made possible our Special Issue Conference held in Vancouver in October 2009. We also thank all the authors and reviewers, whose work turned this Special Issue from editors ’ vision into reality. We are grateful to Rosalie Tung for delivering a keynote speech at the conference, as well as to Mick Carney, Tom Roehl, and Jongwook Kim for invigorating the discussions of papers presented at the conference. Phil

the US economy or a public policy issue of importance to the entrepreneurial community, ” presented at the 2008 Babson Conference (University of North Carolina, June 2008) with a press release posted at www.sba.gov/advo/press/08-14.html. We are grateful to the SBA and to the Best Babson Paper Award Committee (chaired by Andrew Zacharakis) for their encouragement. All views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NSF or the SBA.

Acquisition research has traditionally been dominated by economic and atomistic assumptions. This study extends acquisition research by integrating behavioral learning and social network perspectives to examine the acquisitions of alliance partners. Specifically, we examine, at the dyadic level, how firms ’ alliance learning approaches (exploration versus exploitation) and their joint and relative embeddedness in alliance networks (joint brokerage positions and relative centrality) can interact to drive subsequent acquisitions of alliance partners. Our analyses of the U.S. computer industry support our theoretical framework, highlighting the unique and previously underexplored behavioral and relational drivers of acquisitions. Alliances and acquisitions are two important organizational activities for accessing external resources (Wang & Zajac, 2007). Although the literature generally treats them as parallel in nature, firms often acquire alliance partners (Folta & Miller, 2002; Porrini, 2004; Zollo & Reuer, 2010). Then, what drives acquisitions of alliance partners? Prior research has primarily relied on economic or financial explanations such as transaction costs, agency conflicts, and real options (Folta & Miller, 2002; Hagedoorn & Sadowski, 1999; Kogut, 1991), and paid relatively little attention to behavioral and network drivers. A stream of recent work has increasingly recognized that firms often draw on behavioral learning to make acquisition decisions

[Abstract] Management scholarship has recently received an increasing amount of criticisms, centered on (1) its alleged lack of relevance and (2) the alleged dysfunction associated with publication-based scholarly competition. In defense of the spirit of management scholarship, we make two arguments. First, the criticism that management scholarship is flawed because it is irrelevant may be itself irrelevant. It reflects a lack of awareness of the nature of scholarship. Instead of losing self-confidence, management scholars should be very proud of our scholarship, which has enabled modern business schools to

Abstract CEO duality, organizational slack, and ownership types have been found to affect firm performance in China. However, existing work has largely focused on their direct relationships with firm performance. Advancing this research, we develop an integrative framework to address an important and previously underexplored question: How do CEO duality and organizational slack affect the performance of firms with different ownership types? Specifically, we compare the moderating effects of CEO duality on the relationship between organizational slack and firm performance in China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private-owned enterprises (POEs). Findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between organizational slack and firm performance, and that CEO duality negatively moderates this relationship in SOEs, but positively in POEs.

Relational exchanges versus arm’s-length transactions

Abstract Few scholars would dispute the argument that mergers and acquisitions (M&As) are different in China and the United States, but we know little about how they differ. This article reports one of the first studies that systematically compares and contrasts how M&As differ in these two countries. While prior research on M&As tends to emphasize economic and financial explanations while treating firms as atomistic actors severed from their institutional and network relations, we develop a new theoretical framework based on relational, behavioral, and institutional perspectives. We not only consider firms as learning actors embedded in network relations, but also compare and contrast their M&A patterns between China and the United States, two distinctive institutional contexts. We find that both a firm’s structural hole position and its learning orientation (exploration/exploitation) in alliances have direct and joint impacts on subsequent M&As. Further, such impacts differ across the two countries, due to their institutional disparities.

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