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The ups and downs of the stock markets are consistently in the news. All things considered, there's no end to reporting the trajectory of volatility. Wide value changes in stock prices are a daily event in any stock market as speculators respond to monetary, business, and political situations. The main question is − did the Indian stock market develop a speculative bubble during the time of the US subprime crisis? Also, in terms of knowledge gained for an investor or a policy maker, we ask the following question: As to what extent are speculative bubbles predictable during a financial crisis? Knowledge gained by investors is also a part and parcel of an applied knowledge economy in a broader dimension.

In this chapter, the authors use a speculative bubble tracker, based on a Wiener stochastic process, to check for the existence of speculative bubbles during the 2008–2009 US subprime crisis. The data used in the study are daily SENSEX values (i.e., combination of stock prices of 30 well-established, most actively traded stocks of financially sound companies listed in the Bombay Stock Exchange) for the period between December 2007 and December 2009. Using such forms of daily data, the authors trace out the price movements using a Brownian motion equation and hence, try to correlate the stock price fluctuations with fluctuations in the crisis index (as put together by the authors) in the Indian context. Interestingly, for India, such a speculative bubble was prevalent during the time period considered pertaining to the 2008 US subprime crisis.

Summing up, the implication in terms of knowledge gained is particularly of interest for the portfolio managers who are engaged in devising diversification strategies for their portfolios.

This chapter presents a study on the work of commercial diplomats as international business promoters at foreign posts. Research has largely overlooked the actual roles and activities of commercial diplomats in explaining the effectiveness of commercial diplomacy and international business support. In this study, it is assumed that commercial diplomats’ behavior is influenced by informal institutions. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 23 commercial diplomats at foreign posts from different countries were conducted and analyzed. The results show three different types of role behavior and differences in proactivity per type. Informal institutions such as background, skills, and experience, cultural differences, and the working environment suggest to explain the differences in levels of proactive international business support behavior of commercial diplomats. Further research is needed to assert these findings.

The authors examine the factors that impact the growth of exchange traded funds (ETFs) from 1990 to 2020. The authors show the first-mover and winner-takes-all effects from top ETF issuers. Besides the longer history and larger asset under management (AUM), the ETFs being managed by top issuers have exhibited lower risks and higher trading volume. Delisted ETFs on the contrary has a shorter history, lower AUM, higher risks, and lower trading volume. For zombie ETFs, the authors find longer history, lower risks but lower AUM and trading volume, controlled for total expense ratio, return, volatility, Amihud (2002) illiquidity, bid-ask spread, turnover ratio, as well as year, issuer, asset class and region fixed effects. The authors further study the ETFs’ AUM and trading activities over the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and find that the GFC has a significant negative impact while the COVID-19 has a positive impact on the ETFs’ popularity. The significant increase in AUM of ETF relative to common stocks during the COVID-19 is associated with retail investors’ holdings, as the authors document a significant reduction of institutional holdings at the aggregate level.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic caught the world by surprise. Suddenly, people, as well as organizations, needed to adapt to a new reality of work from home, work–life balance, e-leadership, extreme hygiene, and social distancing. Companies had to find new ways to operate, and areas such as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) had to react to face the stakeholders' needs. In addition, developing countries had been in a fragile position, as this crisis has deteriorated already weak economic, political, and social conditions. In Mexico, CSR has traditionally assisted on urgent matters such as poverty, hunger, education, work, and other issues that have also been considered in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The aim of this chapter is to describe and analyze CSR response to the COVID-19 crisis of large foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) in Mexico, especially in relation to the SDG agenda. First, we provide a general background of the initial condition, that is, Mexico's situation when the pandemic arose, as well as common attributes of prepandemic CSR in Mexico. Then, we examine the government's response to the crisis. Afterward, we observe and analyze large foreign MNCs' CSR disclosed activities to face the emergency. Main findings imply that companies switched their usual CSR attention from socioeconomical, institutional, and sustainability goals to primary needs. Lastly, we make recommendations on the future of CSR and the SDG in the so-called “new normal.”

This study aims to investigate the effect of the crisis on entrepreneurial activities and how it can be relieved. Specifically, we explore how the positive effects of the human capital (self-confidence, opportunity alertness, and risk willingness) on startup activities are changed after the global financial crisis. Additionally, we explore how knowing an entrepreneur boosts up these relationships. We applied data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) about prospective women entrepreneurs in China in 2006–2007 (precrisis time) and 2009–2010 (postcrisis time). Results show a sharp drop in effect size of self-confidence and opportunity recognition upon women's entrepreneurial actions; however, the global financial crisis nullified the effect of fear of failure on potential women entrepreneurs' business activities. Furthermore, knowing an entrepreneur has no significant moderating effect. Theoretical and practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

An important but often overlooked obstacle in multivariate discrete data models is the specification of endogenous covariates. Endogeneity can be modeled as latent or observed, representing competing hypotheses about the outcomes being considered. However, little attention has been applied to deciphering which specification is best supported by the data. This paper highlights the use of existing Bayesian model comparison techniques to investigate the proper specification for endogenous covariates and to understand the nature of endogeneity. Consideration of both observed and latent modeling approaches is emphasized in two empirical applications. The first application examines linkages for banking contagion and the second application evaluates the impact of education on socioeconomic outcomes.

The competence-based management approach has shed light on how firms represent open systems that link assets, strategic logic, and capabilities in order to create new competences. Nonetheless, we find that there are too few empirical studies that illustrate how competences are distributed within an industry. The following case study is based on an in-depth analysis of innovation and standards-formation in industrial automation. Two examples, the standard-setting community PROFIBUS and the field bus-related sensor consortium IO-Link are used to analyze partnership arrangements and competence-distribution patterns.

This study is based on qualitative interviews and it uses patent data to judge competences of a standard-setting community's partner firms. Referring to the empirical case of IO-Link, we show how the integrator firms’ competence-leveraging can be significantly affected by new technology approaches that reason a novel deployment of capabilities. It seems that the deployment of resources depends not only on industry segmentation, but also on the firms’ coordinated agenda concerning innovative, new functionality of a given standard. Our patent analysis also mirrors the variety of knowledge within a standard-setting community. Furthermore, we develop a concept of layered business systems, that is, a terminology of knowledge, organizational, and technology domains. Standard-setting communities bundle complementarity assets, they make their member firms create both proprietary and open technology, and they integrate knowledge across industry boundaries.

Reducing and eradicating global poverty features as a primary objective of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) for 2030. Since over half a century, the World Bank has disbursed loans amounting to billions of US dollars to assist countries to alleviate poverty. However, the path to zero poverty is often impaired with conflicts, social unrest and, most commonly, economic crisis. In this chapter, we examine the inter-linkage between various forms of economic crises, poverty and government expenditure for a set of 127 countries from 1985 to 2010. Using a simultaneous equation model, we test the direct effect of a financial crisis on the incidence of poverty and its indirect effect through the immediate decrease in government expenditure. Contrary to previous studies, our findings suggest that crises have no direct impact on poverty. We find a similar effect for currency, inflation and debt crisis. However, there is evidence that poverty increases indirectly due to a fall in government expenditure. Our results are robust for non-advanced and advanced economies and alternate estimation technique using factor analysis.

This chapter is concerned with the estimation of spillover effects when outcomes arise as a consequence of bilateral interactions instead of from individual actions. In this type of environments, outcomes are generated on links instead of on nodes of a network, like bilateral prices in over-the-counter markets. The author proposes a link-based spatial autoregressive (SAR) model and discusses identification conditions and a two step least square estimation procedure. The author shows analytically that using a standard node-based SAR, which models nodes instead of links’ outcomes, produces misleading results when the data generating process is link-based. The methodology is illustrated using Monte Carlo experiments and real data from an interbank network.