Theoretical and empirical research in the past decades has advanced our understanding of what determines the vertical boundary of a firm. An equally important but much less understood issue is the impacts of vertical integration on firm performance, mainly because the decision on vertical...

This paper examines how the density and governance of vertically related populations affect the life chances of organizations. We integrate the literatures on organizational ecology and vertical integration to develop a theory of how 1) specialized upstream industries affect downstream survival...

We use enterprise data to analyse and contrast the determinants of enterprise performance in China and Russia. We find that in China, enterprise growth and efficiency is associated with rapid increases in factor inputs, but not correlated with ownership or institutional factors. However, in...

Ninety-two percent of the 1,348 North American executives we survey believe that improving culture would increase firm value. A striking 84% believe they need to improve their culture. But how can that be achieved? Our paper provides some guidance. First, we directly link culture to financial...

Which firms find it optimal to integrate their input suppliers into the firm boundaries of control (vertical integration)? Which firms choose to expand their sourcing activities across the national border (offshoring)? This letter provides novel evidence on these questions based on a Spanish...

This study conducts an empirical investigation of the effects of access to finance on the growth of firms in African countries. In order to achieve this, we made use of a new rich enterprise-level data set from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys and employ both subjective and objective measures...

Millions of nanostores serve bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers in emerging markets. Their suppliers, consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, struggle with high operational costs that largely stem from shopkeepers’ liquidity constraints. We empirically investigate whether suppliers can improve...

In this work we investigate two crucial dimensions of firms' structure and dynamics, that is profitability and productivity performance. The empirical distributions and the associated persistence over time are explored through a set of parametric and non parametric exercises performed on an...

How do financial market conditions affect real economic performance? Empirical investigations of this question have often relied on measures of external financial dependence (EFD) that are constructed using U.S. data and applied to other countries under the assumption of a stable industry...

Trade credit is reciprocal in that firms grant credit to customers and also accept credit from suppliers, but the relationship between the joint and net effects of trade receivables and trade payables on performance are scant in the existing literature. Panel data regression analysis is used in...