When do firms expand abroad? Theory to date suggests that global expansion happens when firm-specific competitive advantages outweigh country-specific difficulties in operating abroad. Differences in culture, in legislation, in administrative practices, and in the overall institutional...

By providing a theoretical framework that explains how and why vertical dis-integration happens, this inductive longitudinal analysis of the mortgage banking value chain sheds light on one of the least studied aspects of industry evolution. I find that gains from specialization set off a process...

The recent surge of interest in “ecosystems” in strategy research and practice has mainly focused on what ecosystems are and how they operate. We complement this literature by considering when and why ecosystems emerge, and what makes them distinct from other governance forms. We argue that...

The fundamental reasons why financial crises start may not have changed much over the centuries, given the immutable qualities and pathologies of human nature. However, the nature of the financial system has changed — it has become secularly more interconnected, immediate, global and complex....

The concept of vertical architecture defines the scope of a firm and the extent to which it is open to final and intermediate markets. A firm can make or buy inputs, and transfer outputs downstream or sell them. Permeable vertical architectures are partly integrated and partly open to the...

In this paper, we consider how a better understanding of entrepreneurial activities can help explain how firm and industry boundaries change over time; and how a more complete understanding of boundary setting can help us understand where entrepreneurial activities are directed. We argue that...

A surprisingly neglected facet of sector evolution is the evolutionary analysis of firms', and thus a sector's, scope. Defining a sector as a group of firms that can change their scope over time, we study the transformation of U.S. banking firms. We undertake a sectoral, population-wide study of...

A surprisingly neglected facet of sector evolution is the evolutionary analysis of firms’, and thus a sector’s, scope. Defining a sector as a group of firms that can change their scope over time, we study the transformation of U.S. banking firms. We undertake a sectoral, population-wide...