Eurasian Business Review最新文献

Perseverance in R&D effort is the first fundamental step towards any kind of innovation. We investigate the beginning of the innovation story, rather than its end, through duration models. Among the drivers of our unconventional IO approach, we focus on heterogeneity, path dependence and market power, measured as elasticity of firm-specific demand. The Schumpeterian hypothesis emerges at the firm level. Heterogeneity at the industry level reveals Schumpeterian and Arrovian patterns, as well as U-shaped and inverted U-shaped patterns. We suggest considering the entire supply chain from a holistic perspective when evaluating mergers and innovation policies that support small firms by reducing their financial uncertainty and improving their institutional environment.

This paper explores how value chain governance affects the innovation performance of suppliers of intermediate products. We take advantage of a unique dataset of Italian firms to identify governance regimes based on the perceived levels of technological capabilities of suppliers and explicit coordination in the value chain. Our results indicate that ‘modular’ value chain governance is more conducive to innovation for suppliers, especially when these firms have medium capability levels. Conversely, market-based governance modes relate strongly to lower innovativeness amongst suppliers, particularly those with lower capabilities. These patterns are also reflected in the sales of innovative products. Our results go partially against other findings in the GVC literature, whereby relational value chains are usually seen as providing the most favorable environment for learning and innovation.

How do the individual pillars of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors perform in times of war? Focusing on euro area stocks around the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, we investigate this question using an event study methodology. Our findings suggest that firms with higher governance scores experienced stronger abnormal positive stock returns, implying that investors particularly valued well-governed firms amidst the uncertainty and adversity. However, the importance of good governance was lower for countries with higher dependency on oil imports from Russia. In contrast, social and environmental considerations appeared to receive less attention from investors during this crisis period. Our study highlights the heterogeneous nature of ESG factors and underscores how their relevance can be context-dependent, especially in uncertain times marked by geopolitical conflicts.

Production innovation enables businesses to remain relevant and drives economic growth. However, many business leaders struggle to identify existing innovation opportunities and are unsure how to execute them with existing resources. This article suggests that organizational innovation—the innovation of a firm’s management practices—helps managers maximize product innovation outcomes. Drawing from firm-level data from the Corporate Innovation Survey of Korea, we find that product/service innovation is positively associated with three types of organizational innovation—the innovation of human resource practices, production processes, and value chain relationships. This suggests that business leaders can maximize their product innovation outcomes by engaging in organizational changes together with product innovation activities. In addition, we explore the channels through which organizational changes enhance product innovation: innovating the management control system helps managers retain top creative talent; value chain innovation leverages the external knowledge necessary for innovation; all three types of organizational innovation are advantageous for acquiring knowledge sources, helping organizational members develop new ideas and novel solutions.

Textual data are the last frontier in the empirical literature on proximity between firms. While there are a growing number of studies using textual data, no robust methodology has yet emerged, nor has any attempt been made to compare the resulting findings with standard measures of proximity based on existing classification systems. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we propose a methodology that can be an effective and applicable tool for measuring proximity between companies. Second, we compare the resulting indicator of proximity, which we refer to as “business” proximity, with industrial and technological proximity scores based on activity codes and technology adoption, respectively. Third, we use business proximity to explain economic performance, assuming that knowledge sharing can occur between employees working in similar firms. Having established the soundness of the methodology, the empirical results confirm the substantial information content of the descriptive texts and provide evidence on the likelihood of spillover effects between firms that are close in the business and geographical dimension.

The aim of the paper is to analyse the main internal drivers of the increase and adoption of online activities carried out by firms in reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on several measures of firm-level performance has been debated in many papers, not enough effort has been devoted to investigating its digitalization impact, especially with respect to the drivers of firms operating in transition countries. To this end, we explore a very detailed firm-level dataset, drawn from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) combined with the Covid-19-ES Follow-up Survey, for 22 Eastern European and Central-Eastern Asian countries. Our findings reveal that (i) higher online activity is associated with higher digital and technological endowment of the firm and (ii) this relationship is shaped by external factors, such as country-level digital infrastructure.

This paper, through an analysis of the relationship between internationalization and a novel concept of performance at the firm level, sheds new light on this stream of literature, as our analysis presents a new approach by examining the internationalization-performance relationship at the firm level and arguing that this relationship is dependent on firm-specific assets. To test this argument, we use a sample of 267 manufacturing firms in Spain. We use a Bayesian stochastic frontier model with random coefficients to adequately capture the heterogeneity of resources across firms. The results reveal that the effect of internationalization on performance is heterogeneously distributed across firms. Finally, the strategic implications of these results for achieving a sustained competitive advantage by firms are discussed.

This study examined the experiential learning of professionals and empirically analyzed the learning effect. As many professional studies have pointed out, professionals must continue to learn and improve their expertise throughout their careers to deliver higher-quality services. Experiential learning is a crucial subject for understanding the construction of professional knowledge. However, not much research has been accumulated. This study categorized professionals’ experience into four subcategories, each exploring the specific effects, distinguishing from previous research conceptualizing experience as a bundle. These four categories are broad experience, task-specific experience, breadth of experience, and depth of experience. Utilizing a dataset of 722 Japanese patent attorneys who owned individual firms, we analyzed panel data from 2002 to 2010. Regression analysis was employed to investigate the effect of patent attorney experience on two performance measures: patent grant rate and grant lag (i.e., time to patent registration). The results show that broad experience and breadth of experience positively impact the rate of patent grants. Additionally, broad experience and depth of experience help reduce the time taken for patent registration. The results are generally consistent with existing studies. However, task-specific experience has a negative effect on patent grant rate, contrary to previous research. This study provided insight into a deeper understanding of the learning curve and the underlying mechanism of professionals’ individual experiential learning. Also, this study added new insights by conducting empirical research in the Asian context since most previous studies have focused on Western professionals.

There has long been debate about whether the motives for corporate philanthropy are selfish or altruistic in nature. This study takes A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges in China from 2016 to 2019 as the research object and analyzes China’s new government–business relationship based on institutional theory. The results show that the new government–business relationship, which is characterized by being close and unsullied, has a significant inhibitory effect on corporate philanthropy. To be specific, the closer and more unsullied the government–business relationship in the region where the firm is located, the lower its level of corporate philanthropy, thus supporting the hypothesis of selfish—and especially political—motivation. A heterogeneity analysis shows that compared with private enterprises and enterprises in areas with high levels of marketization, the new government–business relationship has a less inhibitory effect on the philanthropic efforts of state-owned enterprises and enterprises in areas with lower levels of marketization. Conditional testing shows that the purpose of corporate philanthropy is to obtain more economic resources such as bank loans, government subsidies, and tax incentives. Finally, the improvement in the government–business relationship reduces the economic resources that enterprises obtain from the government, thus indicating that the political motivation for corporate philanthropy will be mitigated after the change in that relationship. The results of this study clarify the actual motives underlying corporate philanthropy and provide empirical evidence for the government to reference when establishing and adjusting the government–business relationship.