We organized business associations for the owner-managers of randomly selected young Chinese firms to study the effect of business networks on firm performance. We randomized 2,800 firms into small groups whose managers held monthly meetings for one year, and into a "no- meetings" control group....

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual R&D...

Large bank holding companies (BHCs) are structured into intricate ownership hierarchies involving hundreds or even thousands of legal entities. Each subsidiary in these hierarchies has its own legal form, assets, liabilities, managerial goals, and supervisory authorities. In the event of BHC...

What is the optimal form of firm organization during "bad times"? We present a model of delegation within the firm to show that the effect is ambiguous. The greater turbulence following macro shocks may benefit decentralized firms because the value of local information increases (the "localist"...

Banks have progressively evolved from being standalone institutions to being subsidiaries of increasingly complex financial conglomerates. We conjecture and provide evidence that the organizational complexity of the family of a bank is a fundamental driver of the business model of the bank...

The emergence of novelty, especially of new categories of people and organizations, is undertheorized in the social sciences. Some social worlds are more hospitable to novel introductions or exogenous perturbations than others. Explaining this relative "poisedness" is essential to understanding...

Business strategy can be defined as a firm's plan to generate economic profits based on lower cost, better quality, or new products. The analysis of business strategy is thus at the intersection of market competition and a firm's efforts to secure persistently superior performance via...