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The International Labor Organization (2020) estimates that eight out of ten enterprises (i.e. own-account workers and small economic units) are informal worldwide. However, less is known about the internationalization of informal enterprises. Here, it is argued that economic blocs, such as sub-Saharan Africa, with a greater proportion of informal enterprises, may provide broader societal legitimacy for them to operate internationally. Thus, informal firms would need to collaborate with other firms to overcome their resource constraints. Geographic colocation is one way to facilitate positive interfirm interactions that promote networking and subsequently cooperation. The purpose of this paper is, thus, to addresses two questions. Firstly, how and to what extent does interfirm marketing cooperation in geographic colocation influence the internationalization of micro and small informal manufacturing enterprises? Secondly, how do the perceived benefits of local external economies moderate this relationship?

The study draws evidence from 125 randomly selected informal enterprises located in two major clusters in Ghana, using a mixed-method approach.

The partial least square - structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis applied revealed two central points. Firstly, sharing marketing costs allows informal firms to upgrade their phases of export development directly. Secondly, the linkage of increasing sales activities and local external economies encourages the progress of the phases of export development and the scope of internationalization. Results confirm that the cluster benefits of interfirm cooperation and local external economies on the informal firm internationalization process complement each other in addition to their linear relationship.

The study contributes to understanding the nexus of the informal sector, geographic colocation and the entrepreneurial internationalization literature. The results should motivate researchers and policymakers to approach informal firm internationalization through collaborative business activities.

Informational efficiency is a fundamental aspect of capital market quality, and therefore, regulators, managers and practitioners attempt to find ways to improve the informational efficiency. Since prior studies primarily focus on the numerical attributes of corporate reporting, it is not yet adequately known whether or not the linguistic attributes of corporate reporting affect informational efficiency. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether corporate reporting readability (readability), as an important linguistic attribute of corporate reporting, affects informational efficiency.

To measure readability, this paper uses Fog index. Moreover, to measure informational efficiency, the paper uses stock return variance ratios.

The findings reveal a positive and significant association between readability and informational efficiency. Moreover, the findings show that the association of readability and informational efficiency is stronger for firms facing higher information asymmetry. The findings further document the spillover effect of readability, in the sense that the readability of economically related public firms affects a firm’s informational efficiency. Overall, the results support the arguments that readability enhances informational efficiency.

This study contributes to the literature by providing evidence on the internalities and externalities of readability in the context of informational efficiency. Thus, the study will be of interest to regulators, managers and practitioners, especially in emerging capital markets, who tend to find practical and easy ways to improve informational efficiency.

We present an overview of research on spillover effects within firms and introduce a classification of the literature. We divide spillovers into either technological or social in nature. In our classification, a technological spillover is one in which an agent rationally responds to a cue in the workplace that does not rely on the identity or characteristics of a coworker. Social spillovers, on the other hand, may be thought of as arising from the social preferences of an individual or social norms established in the organization.

The purpose of this paper is to examine spillover effects across differently educated workers. For the first time, the authors consider “reverse” spillover effects, i.e. spillover effects from secondary-educated workers with dual vocational education and training (VET) to tertiary-educated workers with academic education. The authors argue that, due to structural differences in training methodology and content, secondary-educated workers with VET degrees have knowledge that tertiary academically educated workers do not have.

The authors use data from a large employer-employee data set: the Swiss Earnings Structure Survey. The authors estimate ordinary least squares and fixed effects panel-data models to identify such “reverse” spillover effects. Moreover, the authors consider the endogenous workforce composition.

The authors find that tertiary-educated workers have higher productivity when working together with secondary-educated workers with VET degrees. The instrumental variable estimations support this finding. The functional form of the reverse spillover effect is inverted-U-shaped. This means that at first the reverse spillover effect from an additional secondary-educated worker is positive but diminishing.

The results imply that firms need to combine different types of workers because their different kinds of knowledge produce spillover effects and thereby lead to overall higher productivity.

The traditional view of spillover effects assumes that tertiary-educated workers create spillover effects toward secondary-educated workers. However, the authors show that workers who differ in their type of education (academic vs vocational) may also create reverse spillover effects.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether Islamic stock indexes outperform conventional stock indexes, in terms of informational efficiency and risk, during the recent financial instability period.

The paper uses a state space model combined with a standard GARCH(1,1) specification while taking into account structural breakpoints. The authors allow for efficiency and volatility spillovers to be time-varying and consider break dates to locate periods of financial instability.

Empirical results show that Islamic stock indexes are more volatile than their conventional counterparts and are not totally immune to the global financial crisis. As regards of the informational efficiency, the results show that the Islamic stock indexes are more efficient than the conventional stock indexes.

Resulting evidence of this paper has several implications for international investors who wish to invest in Islamic and/or conventional stock markets. Policy makers and even academics and Sharias researchers should as well take preventive measures in order to ensure the stability of Islamic stock markets during turmoil periods. Overall, prudent risk management and precocious financial practices are relevant and crucial for both Islamic and conventional financial markets.

The originality of this study is performed by the use of time-varying models for volatility spillovers and informational efficiency. It considers structural break dates that think about the dynamic effect of informational flows on stock markets. The study was developed in a global framework using international data. The global analysis allows avoiding country specific effects.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate contagion across eight major exchange rates by providing more information on the role of information spillovers.

The empirical analysis makes use of two methodologies that capture channels of contagion. Such methodologies explicitly consider information spillovers characterized by the response of currency markets to real-time macroeconomic surprises, i.e., divergences between expectations and realizations.

The empirical findings denote the presence of contagion effects, originating from information spillovers.

The empirical findings provide insight about how to derive appropriate policy responses, which are crucial for policymakers to understand the source and nature of such exposures, while this insight might have some bearing with respect to the choice of an exchange-rate regime. The results from this paper may also have implications for investors in relevance to portfolio re-balancing and the construction of optimal portfolio diversification strategies.

This is the first empirical attempt that explores the role of informational spillovers in exchange rate markets and also explores the employment of advanced econometric methodologies to satisfy the above research goal.

This paper investigates the change in informational spillover between nine Asian capital markets and the United States as a result of the 1997–98 financial meltdown in Asia. Our study period extends from about three years prior to the start of the crises on July 2, 1997 to one year after this date. We conduct spillover studies on daily stock market index prices and returns to determine the changes in market interdependence. Our results indicate a considerable increase in cross‐border cointegration during the crisis. Dramatic shifts in predictability and volatility spillovers are observed in most Asian countries as a result of the Asian financial crisis, providing evidence of an increase of interdependence between Asian countries, and thus suggesting contagion. We observe a strong interdependence with the US markets before the crisis, which persists during the crisis. We also show that Hong Kong and Korea have emerged as the most dominant influences in the region during the Asian financial crisis.

This work investigates the volatility spillovers across stock markets and the nature of such spillovers through different periods of crises and tranquility.

Using daily stock return volatility data from June 2003 to June 2021, the generalized forecast error variance decomposition method (based on Diebold and Yilmaz, 2012 approach) is employed to measure the degree of volatility spillovers/connectedness among stock markets of 24 Asia–Pacific and 12 European Union (EU) economies.

The empirical results from static analysis suggested that about 28.1% (63.7%) of forecast error variance in return volatility for Asia–Pacific (EU) markets is due to spillovers. The evidence from dynamic analysis suggested that during mid of the global financial crisis, European debt crisis (EDC) and Covid-19, the gross volatility spillovers for Asia–Pacific (EU) was around 67% (80%), 65% (80%) and 73% (67%), respectively. The degree of net volatility transmission from Singapore (Denmark) to other Asia–Pacific (EU) markets was found to be highest.

The findings have crucial implications for the investors and portfolio managers in assessment of risk and optimum allocation of assets and investment decisions.

This study adds to the literature on risk management by systematically examining the impact of global financial crises, EDC and Covid-19 on the market interactions by capturing the magnitude, duration and pattern of the shock-specific market volatilities for a large sample of Asian and European markets using recent and large data set.

In this chapter we develop a conceptual model describing how global teams do more than accomplish discrete tasks, and create “spillover coordination” effects by influencing the amount of work-related direct contact among team members outside the task boundaries of the team. We theorize that spillover coordination is the result of relational and cognitive social capital developed through team interaction. We also propose that the design of the team and the context in which it operates influence the degree to which social capital develops.

We develop a conceptual model including propositions that can be tested empirically. We suggest avenues for future research.

Our model proposes that teams are a more powerful cross-border integration mechanism than originally thought in existing literature in international management and organizational behavior, since they affect social capital that can benefit the broader MNE beyond scope of the task and after the team disbands. Our approach suggests that MNE managers should be mindful of global team spillover effects and intentional in the way they design global teams if those benefits are to be achieved.

Most research on global teams, and teams in general, does not look past the task and time boundary of the team. We expand the view of team effectiveness to encompass those dimensions.

This chapter investigates the impact of policy interest rate news from the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) on stock returns and volatilities of U.S. NYSE and German DAX listed commercial banks. We find that Fed news has the most influence on both U.S. and German listed bank stocks and an unexpected policy rate increase (decrease) lowers (raises) returns and raises volatility in the majority of cases. On the other hand, ECB news generally increases bank stock volatility in the United States but has little impact within its own domestic banking industry. While our results for the U.S. listed banks confirm that their stock prices are more responsive in bad economic times and also during periods of monetary tightening, we find disparities for German banks suggesting that U.S. and European banking industries respond heterogeneously to monetary policy news but the Global Financial Crisis increased the sensitivity of all banks to monetary policy news.