More Like this

1. Job Creation, Small vs. Large vs. Young, and the SBA

   Brown, J. David; Earle, John S.; Morgulis, Yana (January 2017, Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses: Current Knowledge and Challenges)

   Analyzing a list of all Small Business Administration (SBA) loans in 1991 to 2009 linked with annual information on all U.S. employers from 1976 to 2012, we apply detailed matching and regression methods to estimate the variation in SBA loan effects on job creation and firm survival across firm age and size groups. The number of jobs created per million dollars of loans generally increases with size and decreases in age. The results imply that fast-growing firms (“gazelles”) experience the greatest financial constraints to growth, while the growth of small, mature firms is least financially constrained. The estimated association between survival and loan amount is larger for younger and smaller firms facing the “valley of death”. 

   more » « less
2. Disruption and Rerouting in Supply Chain Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2409  

   Birge, John R.; Capponi, Agostino; Chen, Peng-Chu (December 2022, Operations Research)

   We study systemic risk in a supply chain network where firms are connected through purchase orders. Firms can be hit by cost or demand shocks, which can cause defaults. These shocks propagate through the supply chain network via input-output linkages between buyers and suppliers. Firms endogenously take contingency plans to mitigate the impact generated from disruptions. We show that, as long as firms have large initial equity buffers, network fragility is low if both buyer diversification and supplier diversification are low. We find that a single-sourcing strategy is beneficial for a firm only if the default probability of the firm’s supplier is low. Otherwise, a multiple-sourcing strategy is ex post more cost effective for a firm. Funding: J.R. Birge acknowledges financial support from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The research of A. Capponi has been supported by the NSF/CMMI CAREER-1752326 award. P.-C. Chen acknowledges financial support from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong [Early Career Scheme Grant 27210118]. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2409 . 

   more » « less
3. A Computational Framework for Understanding Firm Communication During Disasters

   https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.0128  

   Yan, Bei; Mai, Feng; Wu, Chaojiang; Chen, Rui; Li, Xiaolin (June 2024, Information Systems Research)

   Firms’ public communication on social media during disasters can benefit both disaster response efficiency and the perception of the corporate image. Despite its importance, limited guidelines are available to inform firms’ disaster communication strategies. The current study examines firms’ communication on social media in various disasters and how it impacts public engagement. We employ a novel natural language processing (NLP) approach, Semantic Projection with Active Retrieval (SPAR), to analyze Facebook posts made by Russell 3000 firms between 2009 and 2022 concerning various disasters. We show that firm communication can be measured based on two dimensions derived from the Competing Values Framework (CVF): internal versus external and stable versus flexible. We find that social media messages that emphasize operational continuity (internal/stable-oriented) are more popular during biological disasters. By contrast, messages that stress innovations and adaptations to disasters (external/flexible-oriented) elicit more engagement in weather-related disasters. The study offers a framework to characterize and guide firms’ design of disaster communication on social media in different disaster contexts. Our SPAR method is also available to firms to analyze their social media data and uncover the underlying patterns in communication across different contexts. 

   more » « less
4. Dataset associated with U.S. Apparel Manufacturers Survey

   https://doi.org/10.25675/10217/234595  

   Miller, Nancy J.; Engel-Enright, Carol (January 2022, Mountain Scholar)

   Firms do not continue and prosper purely on their own individual endeavors, as each firm is influenced by the activities of others, and thus direct and indirect relationships shape the firm’s strategic management. These relationships form the tactics by which knowledge and other strategically important resources are accessed and created. Forming and maintaining ties among members of a network have been the subject for numerous research studies in the social, economic, and business literature. Our work is framed by the resource-based view of the firm perspective along with social capital theory and its shared constructs in network theory. Prior findings suggest that networking ties are strategic actions generated for firm growth and continuance. The ties may be short-term or develop into long-term relationships. The purpose of this research is to fill some of the gaps in interorganizational networking strategy by analyzing five antecedents that have been suggested in the literature as individually associated with entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties. In this way, our work provides another research avenue for examining networking’s contribution to strategic management. We hypothesized positive connections to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties from antecedents involving the firm’s knowledge absorptive capacity, business goals, entrepreneurial orientation, social interactions, and support from their environment. We tested our proposed macrolevel direct and moderating connections through an online survey of 125 U.S. apparel manufacturing firms. The apparel manufacturing sector in the U.S., as in many countries, has struggled with multiple disrupting factors contributing to the sector’s decline in firm continuance. Networks, serving to build domestic and international supply chain ties, may provide one solution for adapting the firm’s resources enhancing global competitiveness. Findings from OLS regression analyses support our hypothesized connections in that each of the five antecedents significantly contributed to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties; however, when all five were collectively examined only absorptive capacity, social interaction, and business goals were significant (R2 = 0.58). Further examination of moderation effects found the entrepreneurs’ perceptions of a supportive environment to modify both entrepreneurial orientation and business goals. The effects of a supportive environment on business goals’ relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment decreased, while the effects of a supportive environment on entrepreneurship orientation’s relationship with network ties were greater when perceptions of a supportive environment increased. Future studies may direct attention to other industry sectors or countries for replication with larger sample sizes as we recognize the limitations to generalizability and scale refinement due to our limited sample size. Examining the five constructs sheds light on how an organization’s decisions may relate to engaging in networking and provides theoretical as well as practical implications that contributes to the larger organizational system framework. This dataset contains responses from 97 U.S. apparel manufacturers collected via an online survey during the fall of 2019. The apparel manufacturing sector in the U.S., as in many countries, has struggled with multiple disrupting factors contributing to the sector’s decline in firm continuance. Networks, serving to build domestic and international supply chain ties, may provide one solution for adapting the firm’s resources enhancing global competitiveness. The purpose of the study was to examine connections to entrepreneurs’ engagement in network ties from antecedents involving the firm’s knowledge absorptive capacity, business goals, entrepreneurial orientation, social interactions, and support from their environment. 

   more » « less
5. Centers of gravity: The effect of stable shared leadership in top management teams on firm growth and industry evolution

   https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3048  

   Agarwal, Rajshree; Braguinsky, Serguey; Ohyama, Atsushi (June 2019, Strategic Management Journal)

   Abstract Research SummaryWe study the processes of firm growth in the evolution of the Japanese cotton spinning industry during 1883–1914 by integrating strategy and historical approaches and utilizing rich quantitative firm‐level data and detailed business histories. The resultant conceptual model highlights growth outcomes of path dependencies as firms evolve across periods of single versus shared leadership, establish stability in shared leadership, or experience repeated discord‐induced top management team (TMT) leader departures. While most firms do not experience smooth transitions to stable shared TMT leadership, a focus on value creation, in conjunction with talent recruitment and promotion, enabled some firms to achieve stable shared leadership despite discord‐induced departures, engage in long‐term expansion, and emerge as “centers of gravity” for output and talent in the industry. Managerial SummaryWe demonstrate stable shared leadership is at root of firms who emerge as centers of gravity in an industry and account for the lion's share of output. Stable shared leadership enables growth strategies such as talent recruitment, product diversification, downstream integration, and acquisitions. Stable shared leadership, however, is extremely difficult to maintain. Most firms experience discord‐induced departures in TMTs due to politics and power struggles. Firms that deviate from this norm to become industry leaders achieve stable shared leadership by adhering to fundamental principles related to long‐term value creation as opposed to short‐term gain, adoption of merit‐based promotion systems in defiance of stereotypes, sharing of power within TMT leadership to enable efficient division of labor, and honorable resolution of conflicts and ethical breaches. 

   more » « less