Using survey data from China and India, we explore the impact of network strategy of new ventures in emerging markets. We focus on two critical dimensions of network strategy, namely, broadening and deepening the network and two types of knowledge: market knowledge and technological knowledge. We find that proactive network deepening is associated with market knowledge and network broadening with technological knowledge. From a network perspective, our work highlights the counterintuitive outcomes of breadth versus depth orientation in network strategy, highlighting differences between advanced and emerging economies. We use a post-hoc multi-group analysis to show the differences even within the two emerging markets: India and China. The direct effect of partnering proactiveness on market knowledge in India is significantly higher than that in China but there is no significant difference as to the effect of technological knowledge. We use this exploratory study to highlight the opportunities for network and entrepreneurship scholars to study emerging markets and, in particular, undertake comparative studies between new ventures in China and India.

Literature has advanced two contrasting theoretical perspectives related to the governance structure of business groups: the ‘value-constraining’ perspective, which focuses on principal–principal agency conflict and organizational inertia theory, and the ‘value-enabling’ perspective, which emphasizes the role of business groups in mitigation of institutional voids. Building on these two competing lenses, we develop hypotheses to examine post-acquisition performance of affiliate firms relative to stand-alone firms. As our empirical context, we study 440 majority-stake, domestic and cross-border merger and acquisition deals closed by Indian firms during the period 2002–2013. The results imply that in emerging markets, despite concerns of organizational inertia and principal–principal agency issues, the value-enabling impact of group affiliation persists. We also examine the contextual impact of intergroup heterogeneity owing to group diversification on post-acquisition performance and find that greater group diversification leads to better performance for affiliate acquirers.

This replication study was invited by the Editor in Chief of Management and Organization Review, Arie Y. Lewin. The original study by Judge, Fainshmidt, and Brown (2014) spanned the global financial crisis (2005–2010), and as such, this anomalous time period may not have been representative of most economies, or even the overall global economy. In this replication study we refine and extend Judge et al. (2014) which explored the provocative question – which form of capitalism works best in terms of ‘equitable wealth creation’? Similar to the earlier study, we find that there are multiple paths to macro-economic success. Notably, effective institutional configurations tend to combine high-quality regulatory institutions, effective skill development systems, and social cultures largely unaffected by corruption so there is some commonality amongst effective configurations. In contrast, ineffective institutional configurations tend to be relatively weak in one or several of these three critical sets of institutions. Importantly, we find some novel patterns emerging from the most recent data, including potentially new forms of capitalism associated with equitable wealth creation. In addition, we find that effective credit market institutions are more important, and collective bargaining institutions are less important than the original study suggested. We discuss implications for the comparative capitalism literature, policy makers, and the future of capitalism in the global economy.