The years surrounding the origins of the term “Manifest Destiny” were a transitional period in the history of industrialization. Historians have done much to analyze the impact of major technological shifts on business structure and management, and to connect eastern markets and westward expansion. They have paid less attention, however, to the relationship among continental geopolitics, industrial development, and frontier warfare. This article uses War Department papers, congressional reports, and manufacturers’ records to examine how the arms industry developed in response to military conflict on the frontier. As public and private manufacturers altered production methods, product features, and their relationships to one another, they contributed to the industrial developments of the mid-nineteenth century.

Pursuing delinquent borrowers requires considerable effort, and creditors may lack the incentive to exert this costly effort in uncompetitive banking sectors. To examine this, we use a uniquely large data set of public and private corporate bankruptcy filings spanning a banking-sector reform that deregulated bank entry across different regions of India. We find that increased banking competition is associated with more firms seeking a stay on assets, a decline in bankruptcy duration, and a shift toward workouts rather than liquidations. The results are consistent with creditors exerting greater effort to pursue delinquent firms and resolve bankruptcies more quickly when competition increases.

Short sellers are known to have private information about security prices. Empirical evidence of short selling, however, is based on only half of short sellers’ trading activity; specifically, the opening of the position. Using disclosed large-short-position data from the Japanese stock market, we provide the first detailed evidence of covering trades and find a positive reaction to short covering that only partially reverses. Although these results are consistent with substantial transaction costs for closing large short positions, they also reveal that some short sellers are privately informed about positive future events and have timing ability in covering positions.

This study precisely investigates the relationship of information technology (IT) and knowledge management (KM) capabilities with organizational agility along with the moderating influence of external environmental actors on this linkage. A matched-pair field survey was conducted and pretested structured questionnaires were administered to accumulate primary responses from 300 business and IT personnel working in various Indian financial groups. The research findings encompass first, IT and KM capabilities are enablers of organizational agility, while KM capability is more effective on agility. Second, a more diverse and less hostile environment is required for IT and KM capabilities to have more positive influence on agility, yet the moderating effects of environmental factors are found to be more on IT–agility linkage than on KM–agility relationship. These inferences provide several implications for the business and IT executives to concentrate on leveraging both IT and KM capabilities for generating augmented organizational agility.