This is an important book. For business historians writing about the late nineteenth century to the present, it offers a kaleidoscope of ways to study the history of the forms and organizational structures of modern big business. Its handle for doing so is the business group. The book is a sequel to Asli Colpan, Takashi Hikino, and James Lincoln's edited, pathbreaking Oxford University Press volume published in 2010 and entitled The Oxford Handbook of Business Groups. The latter opened up new horizons.

The financial crisis of 2008 brought with it a renewed interest in the study of capitalism across disciplines. While historians have since led the way with writings on commodities, labor, finance, and institutions, these have been largely conveyed from the Euro-American perspective without necessarily probing other values, parameters, and conditions beyond western political economy that have shaped business over time. This article suggests that to assess the benefits and limits of the global capitalist experience, we must prioritize unconventional subjects, sources, and styles in how we frame research questions, analyze evidence, and cast narratives. Such an endeavor is especially timely given the growing influence of regional markets around the world and the increasing prominence of computational tools to generate and analyze novel datasets.

We provide new evidence on the economic role of growth options behind the profitability, distress, lotteryness, and volatility anomalies. We use idiosyncratic skewness to measure growth options and estimate expected idiosyncratic skewness capturing investors’ expectations about the firm’s mix of growth options versus assets-in-place. We find that investors require a positive premium to hold stocks of inflexible firms with low growth options and negative expected skewness and that a newly proposed skewness factor based on growth options explains the aforementioned anomalies. Thus, the new measure of expected idiosyncratic skewness may serve to reduce the number of anomalies in the literature.

While entrepreneurs are increasingly recognized as important participants in the medieval economy, their philanthropic activities have received less attention than those of the gentry and nobility. This article identifies the contribution that the study of medieval entrepreneurs can make to broader business history debates surrounding the identity of philanthropists and their beneficiaries, the types of causes they supported, and their impact on wider society. Philanthropic entrepreneurs used the profits of commerce to provide infrastructure, health care, and education to their local communities. Their patterns of philanthropy differed from those of gentry, lawyers, and administrators. Support for municipal infrastructure emerges as a distinctive feature of entrepreneurial philanthropy, reflecting a belief in the importance of trade networks and civic reputation.

With the ageing of the population, researchers are investigating the experiences of people living and working in residential aged care. Positive organizational scholarship in healthcare (POSH) and its focus on ‘brilliance’ has not been used as a lens for understanding or improving aged care, although the sector prioritizes person-centred, consumer-directed care. In this qualitative case study, through in-depth interviews, a focus group, and observations, we use a POSH lens to explore how forms of leadership, management structures, and human resource practices facilitate positive experiences for both staff and residents. A thematic data analysis identified the importance of authentic leadership in creating a client-centred organizational culture where ‘happiness’ is an explicit core value. Educating and recruiting staff that share this vision, alongside reflective engagement, rituals and symbols, enabled the building of a responsive care culture that facilitated acts of ‘brilliance’ in healthcare.

This article examines how two dynamics, one global and one domestic, have interacted to shape the politics of banking in Europe. In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, European governments were subject to renewed structural incentive to promote TBTF banks: in financialized economies, the growth of these banks is perceived as an essential element of a national economy's global competitiveness. Yet, this incentive was subject to enhanced political contention at home. Factions—often led by actors from within the state itself—have opposed governments’ impetus to promote TBTF banks. The specific identity, preferences and resources of these factions are determined by distinctive political institutions and vary across countries. Through the comparative analysis of banking structural reform and banking competition policies in the UK, France and Germany, I argue that varieties of regulatory outcomes are explained by the differentiated institutional capacity of “anti-TBTF” factions to carry weight in policymaking processes across jurisdictions.

Firms with lower leverage are not only less likely to experience financial distress but are also better positioned to acquire assets from other distressed firms. With endogenous asset sales and values, each firm’s debt choice then depends on the choices of its industry peers. With indivisible assets, otherwise-identical firms may adopt different debt policies, with some choosing highly levered operations (to take advantage of ongoing debt benefits) and others choosing more conservative policies to wait for acquisition opportunities. Our key empirical implication is that the acquisition channel can induce firms to reduce debt when assets become more redeployable.

In this article we examine whether and how changes in personal bankruptcy laws, viewed as a shock to employees’ expected personal wealth, affect corporate policies. Following a reform in personal bankruptcy laws that limits individuals’ access to bankruptcy protection, firms more affected by this regulation reform increase labor costs, reduce investment, and engage in less risk taking. The effects are stronger when employees have more bargaining power. Furthermore, firms in industries characterized by high unemployment risk reduce leverage. These results support the view that firms choose more conservative policies to mitigate employees’ expected welfare losses.

We study the role of the contractual time horizon of chief executive officers (CEOs) for CEO turnover and corporate policies. Using hand-collected data on 3,954 fixed-term CEO contracts, we show that remaining time under contract predicts CEO turnover. When contracts are close to expiration, turnover is more likely and is more sensitive to performance. We also show a positive within-CEO relation between remaining time under contract and firm risk. Our results are similar across short and long contracts and are driven neither by firm or CEO survival, nor technological cycles. They are consistent with incentives to take long-term projects with interim volatility.

Guanxi is one of the most popular topics in Chinese and Western scholarship concerning social ties in China. However, several problems in research on guanxi persist, and multiple debates are still ongoing without much consensus in sight. This study has two goals. First, we offer a systematic review of the current literature on guanxi, especially by differentiating guan dyads from xi networks. This reconceptualization of guanxi enables us to clarify the concept of guanxi by differentiating its two dimensions. Second, based on this literature review, we propose a redirection of future research on guanxi such that guan dyads and xi networks are not examined in isolation; rather, their holistic and dynamic interaction is the most fruitful avenue for future research, especially the four mechanisms of their interaction. The proposed reconceptualization and redirection are our two contributions to the literature.

In this study, we argue that foreign subsidiaries may benefit from the corporate strategies of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in different ways in terms of knowledge transfer and strategic flexibility. From this viewpoint, we explore the relationship between product diversification and financial performance of their subsidiaries under the condition of MNE geographic diversification. Using panel data on foreign subsidiaries in European countries from 2006 to 2011, we find a U-shaped relationship between product diversification and subsidiary performance and the joint effect of product and geographic diversification. Given the importance of transition economies in international business today, we conducted a subsample test contrasting the results based on the transitional (Central and Eastern European) versus Western European countries. The contrasting results provide important implications for other transition economies like China. We validate the relationship in several ways in our robustness tests.

We develop an integrative perspective on the role of coethnic ties and ties with foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) – normally studied in isolation of each other – on the perceived legitimacy of international new ventures (INVs) from emerging economies. Building on the notions of people (interpersonal diaspora ties) and pipelines (interorganizational MNE ties) in Lorenzen and Mudambi's connectivity theory of clusters, we argue that these could contribute to the focal INV's internal and external legitimacy, respectively, as it seeks to upgrade its capabilities. We go a step further by highlighting people within pipelines – coethnic managers working in foreign MNEs – as a potentially important catalyst of the focal INV's cross-border legitimacy. Using an illustration of an INV from Bangalore, we note that India offers a fruitful setting – and one that is distinct from China – for future INV research into the role of people, pipelines and, in particular, people within pipelines.