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Acquisition is one of key corporate strategic decisions for firms’ growth and competitive advantage. Firms: (1) diversify through acquisition to balance cash flows and spread the business risks; and (2) eliminate their competitors through acquisition by acquiring new technology, new operating capabilities, process innovations, specialized managerial expertise, and market position. Thus, firms acquire either unrelated or related business based on their strategic motivations, such as diversifying their business lines or improving market power in the same business line. These different motivations may be related to their assessment of market growth, firms’ competitive position, and top management’s compensation. Thus, it is hypothesized that firms’ acquisition decisions may be related to their industry growth potential, post-acquisition firm growth, market share change, and CEO’s compensation composition between cash and equity. In addition, for the two alternative acquisition accounting methods allowed until recently, a test is made if the type of acquisition is related to the choice of accounting methods. This study classifies firms’ acquisitions as related or unrelated, based on the standard industrial classification (SIC) codes for both acquiring and target firms. The empirical tests are, first, based on all the acquisition cases regardless of the firm membership, and then, deal with the firms acquiring only related businesses or unrelated businesses exclusively.

The type of acquisitions was more likely related to industry growth opportunities, indicating that the unrelated acquisition cases are more likely to be followed by higher industry growth rate than the related acquisition cases. While there were a substantially larger number of acquisition cases using the purchase method, the related acquisition cases used the pooling-of-interest method more frequently than in the unrelated acquisition cases. The firm-level analysis shows that the type of acquisition decisions was still related to acquiring firms’ industry growth rate. However, the post-acquisition performance measures, using firm’s growth and change in market share, could support prior studies in that the exclusive-related acquisitions helped firms grow more and get more market share than the exclusive-unrelated acquisitions. CEO’s compensation composition ratio was not related to the types of acquisition.

Building upon the framework of the tradeoff model of capital structure and motivated by the equity market timing theory, we examine whether equity misvaluation is a source of adjustment “costs” that will affect a firm’s leverage adjustment speed toward target. We also investigate whether the quality of a firm’s long-term growth options will influence the decisions of managers to exploit the mispriced equity to converge to the optimum. Using a sample of listed Taiwanese firms during 1992–2014 and employing the market-to-book decomposition as developed by Rhodes-Kropf, Robinson, and Viswanathan (2005), we find that overleveraged and overvalued firms demonstrate faster adjustment speed than overleveraged but undervalued firms. Furthermore, controlling for the misvaluation status, high-growth firms converge to target faster than their low-growth counterparts. The effect of growth options on the relation between equity mispricing and adjustment speed does not mirror the effect of financing deficits. With the detailed financial information of the local companies across a rather long time series, this study provides incremental inputs to the literature of capital structure from the determinants of target leverage, the estimation of leverage adjustment speeds, to the identification of the sources of adjustment costs in an emerging market where institutional environment is strikingly different from the US.

Current gazelle and high growth firm (HGF) research provides relatively little systematic knowledge if, how, why firm internationalization facilitates accelerated growth. This chapter aims at providing such an insight by addressing the following three questions: (1) What is the evidence of internationalization as an determinant of HGF; (2) How does internationalization facilitates fast growth?; (3) What do we know about the circumstance under which internationalization contributes to HGF? The chapter concludes that while there is clear evidence that internationalization and its different modes can be important determinants of accelerated firm growth, our knowledge remains limited on how different circumstances of the firm at the micro-, meso- and macro-level interact to condition growth opportunities through internationalization.

This study tests the “Resource Balance Proposition” that is developed from the Resource-Based View (RBV) of strategy. While recent research using RBV to study new ventures has focused primarily on the identification and acquisition of resources (Alvarez & Busenitz, 2001; Lichtenstein & Brush, 2001), this investigation examines the deployment of given resources in the pursuit of growth. It argues that the effective management of the resource base is at least as important to long-term survival as securing that base in the first place. Further, it assumes that firm growth is a desirable goal (especially for young firms) but posits that growth is not without cost and highly accelerated growth is particularly costly. Therefore, the hypotheses presented in this paper propose that there is a growth trajectory that optimizes profits and net worth by striking a balance between the resource deployments necessary to fuel growth and those needed to meet current obligations. The findings from this study confirm that both too little and too much growth have detrimental effects on firm vitality. More specifically, the data show a curvilinear relationship between the absolute rate of firm growth and the levels of both profits and net worth. This finding provides significant support for the Resource Balance Proposition, which states that the allocation of firm resources must be properly balanced between current resource positions and future resource positions to maximize wealth creation.

Why do some ventures grow to become dominant market players while most new ventures that do not fail limp along more modest trajectories? In comparison with our knowledge regarding determinants of venture creation or survival, the phenomenon of venture growth has been relatively neglected, both theoretically and empirically. Venture growth is a multi-level phenomenon co-occurring at different analytical and temporal levels. In this chapter we develop a theoretical model that accounts for venture growth as a process, drawing upon the mechanism-based theorizing approach. We offer nine social mechanisms that lead to venture growth, providing a foundation for empirical exploration and further theory building.

This chapter employs institutional theory and the demand-side approach to discuss the entry of new companies into industries. Theory and empirical evidence provides support for the hypothesis that the industry stage of development is the primary factor that determines whether a company should use innovation or imitation as an entry wedge. The evidence suggests that innovation is most often used successfully during the introduction and decline stages of industry development. Imitation is most often used successfully during the growth stage of industry development. During the mature phase both innovation and imitation are used, but usually with limited success.

Despite the importance of high-technology firms to the global economy, relatively little is known about factors contributing to these firms’ long-run growth. We examine these factors using a unique longitudinal dataset combining two waves of detailed surveys of 345 UK high-tech firms with performance data from UK official datasets. Overall we conclude that the early strategic decisions made by firms have long-run impacts on their subsequent growth, and we suggest that policy measures targeted at shortfalls faced by these firms may have positive long-term consequences.

High-growth firms (HGFs) make a considerable contribution to economic growth, and in recent years they have received increasing interest from entrepreneurship scholars. By analysing recent findings in the literature of high-growth firms, this study identifies some Stylized Facts, as well as contradictory findings, and also some unknowns regarding the determinants and internal strategies of HGFs, particularly on the persistence of their superior growth performance and the implications of recent findings for economic policy.

Today, firm performance must be measured not only on traditional metrics but also on those that reflect the changing imperatives and new metric knowledge. Thus, the focus of managers, investors, and researchers is shifting from rubrics like sales and profitability to growth as a more appropriate measure of firm performance. We aim to highlight the effects that growth of a firm can have on the level of its systematic risk. Using a sample of 203 firms across nine industries taken from the Indian manufacturing sector for a period of 17 years (1998–2014), we develop and test a panel vector autoregressive (VAR) model to analyze the causal relationship between growth aspects and systematic risk of firms. Results depict that a growth option available to firms increase their level of systematic risk and the risk decreases when firms start chasing this growth by increasing their assets in place. Sustainable growth rate, which depicts the growth potential of firms, plays an important role in reducing the level of systematic risk. The findings of this chapter are relevant to managers who think that growth is always beneficial.