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The purpose of this paper is to review the principal provisions of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which was enacted in April 2012 and represents significant legislative reform of securities regulation in the USA.

The paper examines the modified US securities regulatory regime introduced for initial public offerings and SEC reporting by a newly designated class of smaller securities issuers referred to as “emerging growth companies” and summarizes reforms to the regulation of capital‐raising transactions by small issuers and other companies that are intended to facilitate the creation of new jobs by easing regulatory burdens.

The JOBS Act should meet its objective of providing emerging growth companies, at reduced cost, with an orderly transition from a private existence with relatively few securities‐law concerns to a public one with numerous compliance obligations. Companies also will have greater opportunities to access capital through the availability of additional exemptions from Securities Act registration and the elimination of some restrictions on offering‐related communications with investors. The relaxation or elimination of long‐accepted methods for minimizing fraud and abuse in securities offerings, however, could result in a significant increase in investment scams and other wrongdoing.

The paper provides expert guidance from experienced financial services lawyers.

This chapter focuses on the impact that private-equity financing has on nurturing and developing global entrepreneurs in emerging economies. The research question is: how do potentially high-impact entrepreneurial start-ups in emerging economies rapidly expand globally in order to compete with developed-country competitors. Oviatt’s and McDougall’s (1994, 2005) international new venture typology is used to analyze a case study of an emerging-economy, born-global start-up and its relationship with a venture capital firm, which is crucial to develop a competitive international business strategy.

In spite of operating in an emerging country lacking a well-developed entrepreneurial ecosystem (institutional void), a global start-up in conjunction with a venture capital firm that practiced a hands-on investment strategy, was able to successfully scale its business model globally over a 10-year period. The venture capital firm played a critical role in providing institutional support, lacking in this emerging country, to enable the start-up to quickly grow and become competitive with Western competitors.

The South African construction industry is undergoing transformation. Part of this metamorphosis is the explosion in the number of “emerging contractors”. However, emerging contractors have a tendency to fail to develop into sustainable enterprises due to inadequate construction knowledge and lack of experience. These shortfalls can be potentially overcome by learning through appropriate interactions with others who possess the required knowledge and experience but there is an absence of comprehensive data about the form and frequency of such interactions and reliance has tended to be on small scale samples or anecdotal reports. The paper aims to address these issues.

A survey amongst emerging contractors on interactions in the civil engineering sector was carried out, collecting mainly quantitative but also qualitative data for analysis.

Significant relations between particular forms of interactions and knowledge perceived to be held by the respondents exist. Interdependencies between interactions and knowledge levels are present. Yet, the findings indicate that these interactions are not fully capitalised on in terms of knowledge gains by the respondents.

Using the conceptual framework of the Basho, as introduced by Nonaka, the knowledge of patterns of interactions with indicators of knowledge‐interaction interdependencies are of interest. Mapping these allows for the relevant existing learning contexts and knowledge transfer mechanisms to be explored and described.

This chapter aims to analyze the participation of entrepreneurship studies from the perspective of capabilities and technology-based startups in Latin America, which implies considering capabilities from a perspective of innovation, technology, knowledge, and learning. The chapter conducts a bibliometric review from which the characteristics of the Latin American presence in the analysis of startups and related issues are identified. The analysis shows that Latin America has had a small but growing presence at the world level, as is the case with the treatment of the startups in the international arena, and where the topics of innovation and capabilities have been little addressed. A scheme is proposed based on which entrepreneurial capabilities are considered as a way of understanding the creation and trajectory of startup companies. In the trajectory of the startup companies, these capabilities unfold and grow through processes of integration of complementary resources and learning processes, which result in the construction of new capabilities that feed the further growth of the company.

This study aims to examine the effect of reducing disclosure and auditing requirements on audit quality, auditor effort and auditor conservatism. The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act of 2012 is used as a setting for this research. The JOBS Act aimed to boost economic growth by easing emerging growth companies’ (EGCs) access to capital markets. The Act provides scaled disclosure and auditing provisions and exemptions for EGCs.

Using data from Capital IQ, CRSP and Audit Analytics on EGCs and matching non-EGCs between 2012 and 2018, this study assesses the effect of such reduced disclosure and audit requirements on audit quality, auditor effort and auditor conservatism.

The findings denote that while audit quality and auditor effort are lower for EGCs, auditor conservatism is not different for EGCs as compared to non-EGCs.

This study expands the current research by providing evidence on the impact of reduced reporting and auditing requirements on auditor conservatism and audit quality, in addition to auditor effort in EGC engagements.

The purpose of this study is to extend the Fraud Diamond Theory to celebrity Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) and investigate their post-Initial Public Offering (IPO) stock market performance.

After obtaining a sample of celebrity SPACs from the Spacresearch.com database, fraud risk characteristics were obtained from Lexis Nexus searches. Buy and hold abnormal returns were calculated for celebrity SPACs versus a small-cap equity benchmark for time intervals after IPO, and multiple regression analysis was performed to examine the relationship between fraud risk features and post-IPO returns.

Celebrity SPACs exhibit Fraud Diamond characteristics and significantly underperform a small-cap stock portfolio on a risk-adjusted basis after IPO.

This study only examines celebrity SPACs that conducted IPOs on the NYSE and NASDAQ/AMEX and does not include those that are traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board (OTCBB).

Celebrity endorsement of SPAC vehicles attracts investors who may not be properly informed regarding the risk characteristics of SPACs. Accordingly, investors should be warned that celebrity SPACs underperform a small-cap equity portfolio and exhibit significant elements of fraud risk.

The use of celebrity endorsement as a marketing device to attract investment in SPACs has regulatory implications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to examine the fraud risk characteristics and post-IPO performance of celebrity SPACs.

Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act 2012 (the JOBS Act) was passed in 2012. JOBS Act enables emerging growth companies (EGCs) to go public without being subject to the full vigorous range of regulations applicable to publicly traded companies. The purpose of this paper is to study financial performance, Tobin’s Q-ratio and value relevance of EGCs.

The sample includes 620 IPOs during the period from April 5, 2009 to April 5, 2015. The analyses use firm-quarter observations.

The results show that EGCs have both lower financial performance, and a lower Tobin’s Q-ratio compared to the financial performance and Tobin’s Q-ratio of non-EGCs. Moreover, the value relevance of accounting information for EGCs is lower than the value relevance of accounting information for non-EGCs.

This study contributes to the accounting regulation literature by documenting the inferior market performance and financial information quality of EGCs, i.e., the unintended consequences of the JOBS Act.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the section of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act related to information dissemination by sell-side security analysts. The paper analyzes how the abolishment of the quiet period requirements for emerging growth companies (EGCs) changes the analyst initiation timing and market expectation of and reaction to the issuance of the analyst recommendations.

This paper considers the effect of the abolishment of the quiet period requirements on analyst coverage initiations for EGCs with IPOs between January 2006 and December 2015 using regression analyses and probability models.

The results confirm the current anecdotal and empirical evidence that a shorter, de facto, quiet period exists. Analyst issue stronger average ratings for EGCs than for similar firms with IPOs before the JOBS Act. EGCs with initiations from multiple analysts also experience stronger positive market reaction than the firms with initial offerings before the JOBS Act. The market seems to anticipate which EGCs will have initiations and particularly which EGCs will have initiations from multiple analysts. The investors, however, do not fully anticipate the strength of actual recommendations.

This paper is important for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to understand how analysts impact the financial markets, how timing of analyst initiations affects stock prices of EGCs and what firm characteristics play a role in securing analyst coverage shortly after initial offerings.

This paper adds to the emerging literature on consequences of and changes brought by the JOBS Act. Specifically, this paper extends the limited literature on analyst initiations issued for firms with IPOs following the JOBS Act, timing of those initiations and magnitude of the market’s response to the initiations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how big-picture sustainability strategies are translated into tangible product development efforts. The authors assert that most sustainable products currently remain confined to niche markets and do not permeate the mainstream. The authors propose that there is a missing link between strategic sustainability goals and operational product development initiatives. The authors establish a path to bridging this gap.

The manuscript is based on a qualitative research design with a sample of 32 companies. Data were collected from semi-structured interviews with product developers as well as secondary data analysis.

The authors delineate three empirically derived approaches firms from the sample pursue to develop sustainable products. The authors identify a phenomenon that the authors’ call the fallacy of trickle-down product sustainability. The authors find that only one of the three approaches – codification – is equipped to successfully turn strategic sustainability targets into authentic sustainable products.

This study provides an actionable guide to executives and product developers with respect to bridging the gap between often elusive sustainability aspirations and tangible product improvements via the process of rigorous codification.

This study provides a novel and unique perspective into strategy, sustainability and product development. The authors synthesize the extant literature on sustainable product development, juxtapose the emergent structure with primary interview data, and elaborate the resource-based view (RBV) to provide theoretical and practical implications. The authors establish scalability as the missing RBV capability of many attempts toward mass–market compatibility of more sustainable products.

To explain the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) June 29, 2017 announcement (as updated August 17, 2017) that the staff of its Division of Corporation Finance will accept draft registration statement submissions from all companies for nonpublic review, thereby expanding a popular benefit previously available only to emerging growth companies (ECGs) under the JOBS Act and, in limited circumstances, to certain foreign private issuers under historical Staff practices.

Explains the rationale and limitations of the new policy, the existing confidential submission process, the expanded class of issuers and transactions that now qualifies for the nonpublic review process, and content and staff processing details.

Recognizing that the confidential submission process for EGCs proved highly popular and quickly became standard practice for eligible companies seeking to conduct an IPO, the SEC has made the nonpublic review process available to an expanded class of issuers and transactions. The expanded confidential submission process for IPOs addresses some of the typical concerns associated with engaging in the IPO process by giving a company more time and flexibility to determine whether it actually will be able to achieve the benefits of going public before it incurs the burdens and expenses of doing so.

Practical guidance from experienced securities and corporate finance lawyers.