We characterize optimal mutual fund risk-taking strategies in competitive multi-period tournaments among multiple players. With multiple competitors, every player begins by taking maximum risk. In the final period, all players continue to take maximum risk except the leading player, who employs a “lock-in” strategy that depends on the magnitude of the lead. Our theory predicts the leader should strategically lock in advantage by reducing risk-taking if and only if the lead is great enough, rather than an increase in risk-taking by the trailers to try to catch up. Empirical evidence from style-adjusted mutual fund tournaments provides strong and robust support.

For organisations, change is becoming a necessity to adapt to the demands of an ever-shifting external environment. In such an environment, conflicting forces create frictions that organisations must address. This study explores the mechanisms through which organisations activate the path towards strategic agility. A single case study approach is used to develop a framework that traces the path to strategic agility in the context of paradoxical tensions. The work shows that strategic agility is the result of four action dimensions that involve values, decision-making processes, knowledge and data management, and of the interconnection of internal and external structures. Instead of eliminating tensions, strategic agility enables organisations to dynamically navigate them. Our work provides organisations with a useful framework for dealing with paradoxes in order to maintain performance in challenging contexts.

We investigate how the government, as a customer, affects a supplier’s environmental policies. We find that government contractors have significantly lower levels of toxic pollution. Exploring the mechanisms, we show that government contractors reduce pollution by strengthening internal environmental governance and increasing investments in pollution abatement. Further analysis rules out alternative explanations related to reduced economic activities and financial constraints. Overall, our results highlight the government’s important role in disciplining corporate environmental misbehavior.

We show that banks use industry knowledge acquired through corporate lending in mortgage lending, a phenomenon we refer to as the “industry expertise channel.” Specifically, banks that specialize in particular industries expand their mortgage lending activity in regions where those industries are concentrated. The impact of industry expertise increases with information asymmetry and borrower risk. In addition, mortgages originated from this channel contain more soft information and perform better. The effect of the channel increases after unexpected industry distress and the 2008 financial crisis, suggesting that the effect is likely causal.

Using close to 800,000 transactions by 66,000 households in the United States and close to 2,000,000 transactions by 303,000 households in Finland, this paper shows that, on average, individual investors with longer holding periods choose to hold less liquid stocks in their portfolios. The relationship between holding periods and transaction costs is stronger among more financially sophisticated households. We confirm our findings by analyzing changes in investors’ holding periods around exogenous shocks to stock liquidity. Our findings challenge the notion that individual investors ignore non-salient costs when making investment decisions and suggest that they are cognizant of the cost of trading stocks.

Using a proprietary data set covering all foreign investors’ daily trades in the Chinese stock market from 2016 to 2019, we find that foreign order flows, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns, implying that these order flows are likely informed. We track the source of this informativeness and find that foreign order flows significantly predict firm-level news and news-day returns, suggesting that foreign investors can effectively process local firm information. Finally, we find that regulatory reforms that generally relax investment access requirements further improve foreign investors’ predictive power.

This study examines how entrepreneurs balance between short-term operational continuity and long-term development amid a polycrisis comprising economic volatility, geopolitical disruption, and regulatory instability. Using survey data from 150 entrepreneurs and four case studies, it develops the Integrated Entrepreneurial Resilience and Growth model, which theorizes resilience through three interlinked mechanisms: improvizational action, institutional workarounds, and strategic reconfiguration. Findings reveal that entrepreneurs employ dual temporal strategies, improvising for immediate survival while planning for future growth. Additionally, ecosystem engagement with accelerators, mentors, and investors enhances resilience by providing resources, knowledge, and legitimacy. The study advances a dynamic and embedded understanding of resilience by linking internal adaptive capacities with external institutional support. It bridges dynamic capabilities and entrepreneurial ecosystem perspectives to explain how entrepreneurs navigate overlapping crises. The study presents a novel framework for resilience under continuous structural disruptions, offering insights for policymakers and program designers seeking to support entrepreneurship in volatile contexts.

Equity returns follow a pronounced V-shape pattern around the onset of recessions. They sharply drop into negative territory just before business cycle peaks and then strongly recover as the recession unfolds. Recessions are typically preceded by a flat yield curve. Probit models relying on the term spread as a predictor therefore time the beginning of recessions well. We show that model-implied recession probabilities based on the term spread strongly improve equity premium prediction in- and out-of-sample and outperform several benchmark predictors. Correcting for a structural break in the mean of the term spread in 1982 further strengthens the forecast performance.

Using model-free skewness measures that exploit the asymmetry in semivariances and option data from the over-the-counter currency market, we find that buying currencies with a high skewness risk premium (SRP) and selling currencies with a low SRP generates high returns and a Sharpe ratio. Asset pricing tests—which control for omitted variables and measurement errors—show that a SRP factor enters the currency pricing kernel and is central to the pricing of risks inherent in a broad currency cross section of 60 portfolio excess returns. These results imply that skewness risk is a strong and priced source of currency risk.

In this article, we call for a more inclusive field of I-O psychology that extends its consideration toward all workers—including nonhuman animal workers—as worthy of study and advocacy. Although many fields in psychology already incorporate nonhuman animals in their theories and implications, I-O has largely overlooked the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of these individuals, who engage in tasks that contribute to society. To demonstrate the intertwined nature of animal and human work, we summarize the variety of occupations and tasks that nonhuman animals have had within the history of humans. These animals have worked alongside humans for millennia, filling similar or complementary jobs that human workers perform. Although the nature of animal works varies, spanning different work dimensions, I-O psychology content areas address challenges found within each of the dimensions. We present a “work dimensions” framework that helps identify when an individual is a “worker” from the lens of I-O psychology. This framework highlights how the same critical work constructs considered for humans can likewise be considered for nonhuman labor. We describe several ways that a nonhuman animal-inclusive I-O can benefit the field along research, educational, and policy dimensions. By considering work along its fundamental characteristics and workers along their mental properties, I-O psychology can become more inclusive of a wide range of individuals at the margins of society.

Drawing on a newly constructed database, this paper examines for the first time the 100 largest industrial enterprises in Turkey over a period of four decades, from 1970 to 2010. As in several other late-industrializing countries, Turkey transitioned from an autarchic to a liberalized and internationalized economy after the 1980s. Our findings show a marked change in large enterprises from a balanced composition of stand-alone family businesses, affiliates of diversified family business groups (FBGs), and state-owned enterprises toward a new configuration dominated by FBG affiliates and, to a lesser degree, foreign-owned firms. This result underlines the central role of the politico-economic and societal context in which the largest enterprises have developed. Furthermore, it demonstrates not only the persistence but also the proliferation of FBGs within a more liberalized and internationalized economic environment. We attribute the expanding prevalence of FBGs and their affiliates despite pro-market reforms to a combination of factors: the new business opportunities created by liberalization and privatization, the internal capabilities of FBGs, and the preferential treatment afforded to entrepreneurs with close ties to the incumbent government.

Recovering Senator Robert Owen’s role in creating the Federal Reserve System, this article reclaims the original vision of the Federal Reserve as an institution in which state democratic power checked private expertise. Populist-minded Southern farmers and country bankers embraced the Reserve as a politically palatable vehicle to ease credit, protect against bank runs, and ensure seasonal liquidity. However, the perception of a “populist Federal Reserve” eroded with the onset of the 1920 postwar recession and the ensuing agricultural depression. We show that Federal Reserve officials prioritized combating inflation and made several decisions between 1920 and 1921 that aggravated the agricultural crisis by artificially contracting rural credit access, alienating farmers and country bankers from “their” central bank. This estrangement was further compounded by Reserve failures during the Great Depression, which encouraged Southern farmers and their representatives to re-embrace old populist nostrums that would become centerpieces of the New Deal.