In the age of disruption, affecting the restructuring of industries, social organizations, the organization of work, globalization, international trade, and technological innovations, this issue showcases two disruptions. The Perspective Essay ‘Opportunities and Challenges of Engaged Indigenous Scholarship’, by Andrew H. Van de Ven, Alan D. Meyer, and Runtian T. Jing, followed by the commentary of Anne Tsui, confronts management scholars with the imperative to break out of the straitjacket of testing hypotheses derived from the dominant Western economic, management, and psychological theories with indigenous data. Tsui and Van de Ven, Meyer, and Jing challenge us to rediscover scholarship, which starts with observing actual indigenous phenomena, and employ eye-opening insights and abductive reasoning to arrive at new or different explanatory mechanisms. Data on indigenous phenomena can come from observations of actual phenomena relating to individuals, families, and organizations addressing the limitations of bounded rationality, finding the way, preserving harmony, and so forth, and moderated by indigenous institutional envelopes, history, cultural roots, and national aspirations. Indigenous scholarship welcomes applications of diverse approaches, including qualitative and quantitative data from actual case studies, field surveys, experiments, and ethnographies. This call for indigenous engaged scholarship dovetails with MOR's initiative in favor of the preapproval of research ideas and empirical plans (https://doi.org/10.1017/mor.2017.37), and we hope it will provide scientific legitimacy for indigenous research, which observes actual phenomena and eschews predetermined lenses of Western theories.

Banks are growing ever larger compared to their national economies. We show that increases in relative bank size (measured as a bank’s liabilities divided by national GDP) are linked to banks displaying higher tail risk. This effect is not entirely due to risk channels that disproportionately expose relatively large banks to systematic tail risks, sovereign risks, or banking crises. Instead, we detect a persistent component in the tail risk of relatively large banks that is bank-specific and connected to government guarantees. Furthermore, as banks grow in relative size, tail risks are shifted to debtholders without wealth gains for shareholders.

This interview contributes to the conversation around the automobile industry by focusing on the Chinese electric vehicle (EV) sector. Both of the discussants’ research interests encompass China's industrial competitiveness, innovation, science and technology policy, and the evolution of Chinese manufacturing industries. Professor Feng Lu, the interviewee, has conducted continuous and substantial fieldwork tracing the development of the Chinese automobile industry. He was one of the first experts to urge the Chinese government to help local automobile manufacturers develop innovation capabilities and proprietary products. Further, his 2005 book, The Policy Choice to Develop China's Automobile Industry with Independent Intellectual Property Rights, profoundly influenced the national policy transition toward emphasizing in-house innovation.

Although academics can receive considerable training in selecting appropriate research designs, types of data to collect, and methods for analyzing data, as well as guidance on preparing scholarly manuscripts, there is a dearth of information on how to initiate and manage partnerships with organizations in order to conduct high-quality applied research, particularly when the research is quantitative in nature. In this article, we provide our own experience-based insights and recommendations to help academics more easily (a) initiate a research relationship with senior organizational leadership, (b) decide early whether to pursue or end a research collaboration with an organization, (c) keep the organization engaged during the study, and (d) maintain the relationship with the organization after data collection is complete. This information is proposed as a complement to traditional organizational research methods and as instrumental in the pursuit of research salient to the interests of organizational practitioners.

We study the effect of corporate cultural similarity on merger decisions and outcomes. Using the similarity in firms’ corporate social responsibility characteristics to proxy for cultural similarity, we find that culturally similar firms are more likely to merge. Moreover, these mergers are associated with greater synergies, superior long-run operating performance, and fewer write-offs of goodwill. Our evidence is consistent with the notion that cultural similarity eases post-deal integration. Our results contribute to the literature on the determinants of merger success, provide new evidence on the impact of corporate culture, and offer a new approach to defining firms’ cultural similarity.

Practice and research with senior leaders can be rewarding but also challenging and risky for industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists; the fact that much of the work with these populations is difficult to access elevates these concerns. In this article we summarize work presented by prominent researchers and practitioners at a symposium organized to share common practices and challenges associated with work at higher levels of organizational management. We review implications for research and practice with senior leaders by examining how assessments are applied at senior levels, how assessments and development practices can be linked, and the challenges associated with research and evaluation conducted with these leaders. Also, we offer suggestions for advancing research and practice at senior levels.

China, the world's largest market for electric vehicles (EV), has put in play a state industrial policy that is seeking to upend global automakers (see Financial Times, October 12, 2017 and May 20, 2018). Exemptions from taxes and subsidy programs have favored the purchasing of an EV, which are also exempt from driving restrictions in large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Policies that target manufacturers include meeting production targets for EVs (the so-called dual-credit policy by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology). China may be on the verge of becoming a global disruptor in an industry that has home market advantages of scale, lower fossil fuel imports, and significant reduction of air pollution in cities while exploiting related technologies such as lithium batteries where China has world class industrial competence. It is in China's national interest to be a game changer in the global automotive industry from fossil fuel to electricity. And building infrastructure – supercharging stations included – fits the government-directed approach that aspires to establish the country as an undisputable global leader in a high-tech sector of global significance.

Tumbling barriers once heralded globalization's ascent. The abolition of capital controls propelled the integration of financial markets from the mid-1970s, and the free movement of capital, goods, services, and labor soon became foundational commitments for the European Union. Multilateral trade reforms, orchestrated after 1995 by the new World Trade Organization, lowered barriers to commerce, while telecommunications and transportation technologies slashed the costs of long-distance transactions. In a stunning development, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showcased the incapacity of even totalitarian regimes to contain the desires of ordinary citizens for freedom, openness, and global engagement. Recalling that halcyon moment, when a bifurcated Cold War subsided and a new era of globalization and openness took tangible form, the journalist Edward Luce invokes Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.”

We provide novel evidence that hedge fund performance is persistent following weak hedge fund markets but is not persistent following strong markets. Specifically, we construct two performance measures, RET_DOWN and RET_UP, conditioned on the level of overall hedge fund sector returns. After adjusting for risks, funds in the highest RET_DOWN quintile outperform funds in the lowest quintile by approximately 7% in the subsequent year, whereas funds with better RET_UP do not outperform subsequently. The RET_DOWN measure can predict future fund performance over a horizon as long as 3 years, for both winners and losers and for funds with few share restrictions.

Betting quotes provide valuable information on market-implied probabilities for outcomes of events such as elections or referendums, which may have an impact on exchange rates. We generate exchange-rate forecasts around such events based on a model that combines risk-neutral event probabilities implied from betting quotes with risk-neutral exchange-rate densities extracted from currency option prices. Its application to predict exchange rates around the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential elections shows that these forecasts, conditional on the respective outcomes, were accurate, and markets were able to separate their views on the likelihood and the impact of these events.