Globalization

Why do startups from mid-sized markets struggle to scale? This study theorizes that a local market that is big enough for a product to gain early traction but not big enough in which to scale can incentivize startups to delay expanding into new markets necessary for high-growth outcomes. This delay introduces adjustment costs that constrain growth.

What tradeoffs do startup founders face in deciding whether to communicate their strategy to employees? While prior research emphasizes the value of clarity and alignment for execution, we find that only about half of employees across 24 entrepreneurial firms can accurately describe their company’s strategy. We tested the effects of strategy communication through two field experiments and follow-up interviews with nearly 600 employees and executives in 24 growth-oriented ventures across 14 countries.

Prior work highlights the importance of cognitive approaches to strategy formation for startup growth. They enable entrepreneurs to strategically reason—logically and convincingly formulate their strategic choices before executing them. However, whether the value of strategic reasoning generalizes across contexts, particularly different financing environments, remains unclear.

How does international exposure shape entrepreneurial pivots? Through a field study of 84 startups across 27 countries, we develop a model that uncovers how international exposure not only spurs ventures to update their understandings of the international market but also generates pivots in the addressed market. Structural differences between markets and entrepreneurs' cognitive openness makes new information about the international market more salient. This new information opens ventures' eyes to novel opportunities.

Over the past decade, data has transformed everyday life. While it has changed the way people shop and businesses operate (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2019), it has only just begun to permeate economists thinking about the aggregate economy. In the early twentieth century, economists like Schultz (1943) analyzed agrarian economies and land-use issues. As agricultural productivity improved, production shifted more to manufacturing. Modern macroeconomics adapted with models featuring capital and labor, markets for goods, and equilibrium wages (Solow, 1956).

While the broader Inflation Reduction Act will substantially cut carbon emissions, the new tariffs on Chinese EVs will have the opposite effect. They risk derailing the transition to EVs, and they pit U.S. middle-class consumers against auto workers and shareholders.

In this paper, we develop a computational measure of the firm-level rhetorical nationalism. We first review the literature and develop a four-dimensional theoretical framework of nationalism relevant to firms: national pride, anti-foreign, dominant agenda, and corporate role. We then use machine-learning-based text analysis of over 41,000 annual reports of Chinese public firms from 2000 to 2020 and identify a dictionary of words for each dimension.